


Thunder on the Mountain

by Skitty_the_Great



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Monster of the Week, spncbb17
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-11-28 18:14:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 23,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11423427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skitty_the_Great/pseuds/Skitty_the_Great
Summary: A string of strange and seemingly unrelated tragedies are plaguing the Appalachian region. Children disappear.  Men go insane.  Hikers are mauled by large animals.  And always...traveling Northward.  Sam and Dean pick up the hunt in a small town outside the national forest.  The creature they're hunting is one of legend, feared by the native tribes that once populated the area centuries ago.  With the unexpected aide of a strange woman also appearing to hunt the creature, the boys must attempt to bring it down before they lose their minds completely.





	1. Chapter 1

Sharon stood at the sink roughly scrubbing a recalcitrant lump of sauce from her husband’s plate. The sponge squeaked loudly on the surface, and the pressure she was placing on it nearly pushed the slippery dish out of her hand. She sighed and mentally told herself to calm down, but it was a pointless admonishment. Her back was still tense. Her shoulders still locked up around her ears. Every move that Douglas made in the dining room behind her seemed louder than it should have been, and thus that much more annoying. She could feel the corners of her mouth dragging down still further and had to remind herself to relax her face. She wasn’t getting any younger. She didn’t want to help the frown lines on their downward path. The worry line on her brow was already deep enough, it didn’t need friends.

The sponge slipped sideways in her grip and her thumbnail caught the front edge of the plate, making a high pitch screech for only a second, but a second was long enough to set her teeth on edge. She slammed the plate down a bit harder than was really necessary and rubbed her thumb. It didn’t hurt, of course. It was a psychosomatic ache, she knew that. She hated those sounds. Keys on tables. Forks on plates. Those high pitched scritches and scratches drove right through her eardrums and directly into her brain and she hated them. Douglas knew that. And yet he was a constant abuser of her poor plates. When Jessica had still been at home, she hadn’t noticed as much. But, now that it was just the two of them, dinner had become a nightly endurance trial, and she just hadn’t been able to stand it another night. Suddenly every annoying trait Doug had ever had was magnified tenfold, and she found herself wondering how she’d ever managed to survive the last twenty five years.

Behind her, Doug sighed, a defeated, world weary sound. His steps were ridiculously loud on the linoleum as he came up behind her, and she felt her back tense up just a fraction more.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice as defeated and downtrodden as his sigh. He didn’t sound sorry for the fight, merely sorry that it had happened at all. Sorry that they found themselves in this situation all too often now. “Can this just be done now? Can I help you with the dishes?”

Sharon sighed, some of the tension leaking out of her, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to turn and look at him.

“There’s nothing to be done with. We’re fine. I’ll stay home alone all day and cook your meals while you go out drinking with your friends, and we’ll be absolutely, 100% fine.”

Doug huffed. She could practically hear him grinding his teeth.

“I wasn’t out drinking, I’ve already told you that. Jimmy came by work and we went out to look at paint samples for the office, I _told_ you that and I can’t believe we’re still talking about this.”

The office...formerly Jessica’s room. They’d let it sit unused for the past two years, just in case she need to come home for a weekend and crash, but she never did. With the exception of Christmas, they had no reason to keep a spare room, and the argument that had followed had been one for the record books. But, in the end, even she’d had to admit there was no point keeping a room that would only be used one night a year. Doug’s argument had been that if he had a home office, he could spend more time there with her rather than at work. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. But now it was something of a sore tooth, and she couldn’t stop worrying it.

Sharon said nothing, merely reached for another dish. Doug sighed and hung his head. Reflected in the window above the sink, he made for a very pathetic figure. She watched him. Watched as he gathered himself up to make another attempt. His head raised and they made eye contact in the glass, his mouth half open to start again, when a loud crash came from outside, making them both jump. Sharon dropped her dish and it clattered loudly into the sink, sending a splash of water over the edge and onto her shirt.

“Damn it!” She almost wanted to turn on Doug as if it were somehow his fault, but that would have been beyond unfair, even in her own mind. She squinted through the glass, raising onto her toes and putting up a hand to shield the glare of the kitchen lights so she could look into the dark yard. “Was that the trash cans? Probably those damn raccoons again.”

“I’ll go take a look,” Doug said. He reached out and put a hand on Sharon’s shoulder, giving it a little squeeze. For a moment, the tension fell away and she gave him a smile. Unified against a mutual annoyance, she felt better. She felt like a team again, if only for that moment. He paused at the door, looking back at her, his face pained but, somehow, hopeful.

“We’re gonna be okay,” he said, and the simple phrase went right through her heart. “I know it’s hard right now...I know you’re...we’re…” He shook his head. “You’ll see, it’ll be better when the office is finished and you’re not here by yourself all the time. I promise.” He gave her a smile, and the small, almost grudging smile she gave back seem to buoy him up. His chest swelled as he took a deep breath, nodded, and headed out through the back door.

The backyard wasn’t as dark as it had seemed from the kitchen. Lit by light from the window and by the back porch lights of their neighbors, the area was mostly visible, if a bit shadowy along the fence. From where he stood by the back door, he could see the trash cans in the far corner, though they were partially hidden in the shadow of the large maple their daughter had planted, how many years ago now? It had been Earth day, he remembered that, much, but had she been in second or third grade? It had been so small then. Had seemed like such a good idea. Now it’s branches covered almost the whole back yard, and had become a constant pruning nightmare. They’d talked about cutting it back, but neither of them really had the heart to do it. Briefly, he hesitated, wondering if he should go back in for a flashlight. With a shrug and a desire to get this over with, he plunged into the yard.

As he rounded the tree, Doug could see that one of the cans was, indeed, on its side, its contents spilled out and leaking into the grass. He could also see that there was something moving behind the can. He squinted, willing his eyes to adjust to the dark. He expected to see a pair of small beady eyes look up at him. Maybe even two or three pairs. But that wasn’t what he saw. His eyes widened, and he opened his mouth, but the sound that came out of him never quite reached his own ears.

* * *

Her husband was screaming. Sharon had lost sight of him as he’d rounded the large tree, but still she’d watched. Only a handful of seconds had passed since she lost sight of him when the screaming began, but it was more than just that. It wasn’t like any sound she’d ever heard coming from a human being, let alone from the man she’d known most of her life. She ran for the back door, fueled on instinct, jerking it open so hard it slammed into the wall, leaving a dent in the plaster as she raced outside. 

The yard was dark and eerily quiet. The screams seemed to have cut off the moment she’d set foot outside, and she froze, suddenly unsure. Afraid.

“Doug?” she called, but no answer came. Next door, a door opened and her neighbor stepped out onto her deck.

“Is everything alright, Sharon? We thought we heard yelling.”

“I don’t know…” She wasn’t sure she’d spoken loud enough to be heard. She wasn’t sure she cared. Cautiously, she stepped out into the yard. 

She saw him, there on the ground, beyond the tree they’d planted with their daughter, in the yard where she’d grown up and they’d spent so many happy years. She saw him laying there, froth on his lips. His body twitched as though something unseen pulled at him. The ground hit her knees and she didn’t remember running to him. She was screaming and didn’t seem to be able to stop.

“CALL 911!” Her voice didn’t sound like her own. It was shrill. It was broken. It belong to another woman. A woman who wasn’t sitting in the damp grass, holding her husband’s head on her lap. She yelled his name, but he didn’t respond. His eyes stared glassily up at her with no recognition. He gurgled as he breathed, but whatever words he might have spoken were lost, unintelligible. He didn’t even seem to hear his wife’s sobbing cries.


	2. Chapter 2

Kitty’s Korner would not have been Sam’s first choice of breakfast locations, but options were a bit limited this far from the main drag.  If the main drag even existed in a town like this.  Sam couldn’t remember the last time they’d even driven past a recognizable fast food joint.  The free wifi sticker in the corner of the front window had really been the deciding factor.  After a night spent in the only motel left in America that didn’t have its own wifi, he’d been feeling positively cut off.  That being said, he wasn’t entirely sure the weak signal he was getting was worth the too small table, with little socks on the bottoms of the table legs, coupled with the too small chair (complete with socks of its own) that seemed to be taking umbrage at both his size and his weight.  He kept waiting for the poor thing to snap all four legs at once like a cartoon.

He was still waiting for his search to load when Dean awkwardly slid into the chair opposite, holding two large, pink striped mugs of what appeared to be milk with just a hint of coffee in them.  His face was pinched with annoyance as he tried to find a place on the little round table to put them.  Sam moved his laptop as close to the edge as he felt was safe and eyed Dean’s coffee choices with some amusement.

“I never thought I’d say it but…” Dean turned one of the mugs in his hand slowly as if he thought it might contain some poisonous concoction, “can’t this place just get a Starbucks or something?”  

“Yeah.  Cause you know what to order at a Starbucks.”  Sam’s sarcasm earned him an unamused glance from his brother, which only made him chuckle.  “What is that anyway?”

“I have no idea.” Dean sighed and picked up one of the mugs but didn’t go quite so far as to drink it.  He sniffed it hopefully but merely made another grimace.  “I asked for black coffee and Grandma laughed like it was a joke.  Next thing I know I’ve got these things.  I’m not even sure they’re coffee.”  He took a small sip.  “Yeah, they’re not.”

Amused, Sam glanced at the old woman behind the counter.  He supposed she was most likely the owner, and her cheery smile certainly seemed to match the place.  On the counter next to her was an obscenely fat orange cat.  The kitty of Kitty’s Korner, it seemed.  As if on cue, Dean sneezed, nearly sending a wave of coffee over the rim of his mug and onto the back of Sam’s laptop.  He moved the computer hastily, pulling it all the way off the table and onto his lap, and gave his brother an annoyed glance.  

“Damn cats,” Dean muttered, and took another sip of his not coffee, with a grimace.

“You could always try not drinking it, you know.”  Sam reached for his own mug, carefully, curious in spite of his brother’s long suffering looks.  He took a cautious sip and, finding nothing but a fairly standard latte with a little bit of caramel and hazelnut, took a longer sip.  It wasn’t bad, if a little fancy for his taste.  He wouldn’t be craving anything sweet for the next week, at any rate.

“Tell me you’ve got something.”  His brother took another sip of his coffee, at least managing to make less of a grimace this time.  His expression seemed to imply he was taking his drinks like shots.  Milky, overly sweetened shots.

“Well, maybe.”  Sam glanced down at his screen.  The news article he’d been trying to load was finally visible and he scanned it for the bullet points he needed to tell his brother.  “It might be nothing.  I wasn’t coming up with much but I started to see this...well I don’t know if it’s a pattern or not but…”

“Well is it or isn’t it?”  Dean was grumpy, and that always made him short.  Sam resisted the urge to sigh.

“I first noticed it in a London, Kentucky paper.  Couple kids went missing.  Around the same time, they had what looks like a gas scare, or groundwater, they weren’t sure.  A lot of people just went crazy.  All men with nothing in common except that they lost their minds.  Some of them had wives, children, but none of them were affected.”

“It’s not much…” Dean said doubtfully, but he slid his chair around the table the better to look at Sam’s screen.

“That’s what I thought.  But then I saw another couple of cases like it in Corbin.  And in Livingston.  Mt. Vernon.  Anneville.  All the same read out.  Couple of Amber alerts, and a gas leak scare.  One or two had wild animal attacks, but it’s hard to say if they’re related or not, they’re all right on the edge of the National Forest.  But all of those victims?  Also men.  Most recent one was in Irving, Kentucky.  So whatever this is…”

“It’s going North.”

“And it’s following the forest.”

Dean seemed to consider for a moment, scanning the Irving Herald article that Sam had pulled up.  At last, he gave a sort of grudging shrug.  “Okay could be something.  They’ve only had one case in Irving?”

“So far.  So whatever it is, might still be there.”

“Alright, it’s worth checking out.  Kids and crazy…”  He pondered for a moment, staring into space, before turning on Sam and holding out a warning finger.  “I don’t want you getting all excited by all those trees.  We’re not going camping.  Last time you dragged me into the damn woods I wound up with a tick in a place no man should  _ ever  _ have a  damn tick.”

Sam chuckled and took a long pull on his coffee.  There was so much milk in it the heat had mostly gone out already.  “Should we get these to go.”

“No,” Dean said, almost a grunt of disgust.  “I’d rather have gas station coffee.  Let’s get out of here before…” He sneezed again and cursed under his breath.  His eyes were starting to look a little red and puffy.

“Let’s just hope whatever it is doesn’t have a cat,” Sam teased, “or you’re done for.”  Dean gave him a glare to wither bone, but Sam just shook his head with a soft laugh as he gathered up his laptop.  “Come on, I’ll drive.  We’ll get you a benedryl and let you sleep it off in the back seat.”

“Har har,” Dean mocked, but rose gratefully, his annoyance with the day seeming to melt off him in an instant.  Sam envied his brother that.  The single mindedness that allowed his brother to shrug off the world the moment he had a job to do.  Sam watched him for the briefest moment, his expression almost wistful, before following him out the door.


	3. Chapter 3

Sharon sat at the kitchen island, clutching a cup of coffee long gone cold, staring into space.  She’d thought the house was quiet before.  It hadn’t been.  Now she understood what true silence was.  For awhile she’d kept the television on, choosing innocuous talk shows or sitcoms to fill the emptiness, but it hadn’t helped.  If anything it had made it all seem so much worse.  The silence was better.  At least it didn’t grate on her the way the sound of the televion did.  She could sit in the kitchen and listen to the hum of the refrigerator and let her gaze go unfocused and, for a time, not have to live in this strange, unfamiliar world in which she was all alone.

A knock on the door startled her, making her flinch so hard she nearly upset her cup of coffee.  She glanced down at it, confused for a moment by its lack of warmth, and then glanced at the clock on the microwave.  She’d been sitting at that island for over an hour.  She couldn’t recall a single thought she’d had in that time.  

Sharon slid off the high stool and stood for a moment, clutching the edge of the island, as her knees protested the sudden change.  The knock came again.

“Coming,” she called in what sounded, at least to her, like a completely normal tone of voice.  Perhaps she was a better actor than she’d ever known.  But then...of course she had been.  She’d been a mother after all, and nothing was truer of motherhood than the concept of burying one’s self for another person.

S haron made her way to the door, wondering which of her neighbors it would be this time.  She was already up to her ears in casseroles, half of which smelled so terrible she was loathe to even try throwing them out for fear of the stench lingering in her kitchen.  But, when she twitched open the curtain on the front door, it wasn’t one of her neighbors looking back at her.  It was two rather tall men in very official looking suits.  She looked at them in blank surprise through the glass, too taken aback to even ask who they might be.

“Mrs. Stanton?” the taller of the two men asked, giving her a concerned look that had her glancing down, touching her hair, wondering what sort of mess she presented.  “We’re from your husband’s insurance agency.  We’d just like to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right.”

Insurance.  Of course.  That made sense, of course they would want to talk to her.  People didn’t spontaneously go out of their mind after all.  They only did that in the movies.  But wait...she’d talked to the insurance people at the hospital hadn’t she?  She narrowed her eyes at the men on the other side of the door.

“I already told the insurance company everything I know.  Police too.”

“This is just a follow up,” the taller of the two men said quickly.  He gave her a sympathetic look that she wasn’t sure if she liked, but didn’t seem to be pandering at least.  That was something.  “We can come back another time if you like.”

“No it’s...it’s fine, come in.”  Opening the door for them, she stepped out of the way, suddenly wondering when the last time she’d brushed her hair and teeth had been.  This morning, surely.  Hadn’t she?  She put a hand to her head as surreptitiously as possible.  It felt smooth.  So there was that at least.

The two men sat down on the sofa, comfortably side by side, as though they’d done this a thousand times before and would likely do it a thousand times again.  It was oddly comforting, the familiarity they seemed to have with the situation.  It was just business to them.  It could be just business for her, too.  At least for the time being.  Sharon took a seat in what had been her husband’s armchair.   _ Still his armchair _ , she chided herself mentally, looking down at her hands rather than at the men opposite her.  The shorter of the men, his expression far more stern and unyielding than his partner, spoke first.  

“Thank you for your time, Mrs. Stanton.  We just have a few routine questions in situations like these.  Any information you can give us will help, no matter how small, how insignificant you think it might be.”

“I’m not sure what more I can tell you,” she said honestly.  “I didn’t even see what happened.  It was all over so fast.”

“Was it just the two of you, here alone?” the tall one asked, somehow seeming to look up at her, despite his superior height.  Something about the way he ducked his head when he spoke...  Sharon nodded.

“Our daughter...she was with us for a long time after college but she just moved out…”  No, that was incorrect.  “Um, two years ago.  She moved out two years ago.”

“That doesn’t really seem like  _ just  _ to me.”  The shorter one was peering at her, as if this was a telling bit of information, and Sharon straightened a little in her chair, defensive.

“It’s not exactly uncommon, these days, for kids to stay home with their parents.  She was still on our insurance, after all. But it’s been...quiet...without her.  It doesn’t seem like as long as it’s been, I guess.  It’s not been easy…”  She trailed off with a sigh.  They didn’t need to know all this.  It didn’t have anything to do with Doug, after all.  Did it?  She glanced at them, suddenly intense.  “You don’t think her leaving had anything to do with this do you?”

“No,” the taller, nicer of the two men rushed to assure her.  “But it could have been a contributing factor.  A weakening in his mental state.  It’s all good information to have.”

She liked him better than his partner.  He seemed so much more caring.  She glanced between the two of them a bit uneasily.

“Well...like I said...it’s just been the two of us for awhile now.  It causes stress.  We were fighting more, over stupid things really.”  Her throat constricted unexpectedly and she took a moment before continuing on.  “He wanted to go on a second honeymoon…” her voice was thicker than she wanted it to be.  “He thought it would help us reconnect as people now that we weren’t technically parents anymore.”

“Is that what you were talking about, the night it happened?” the kind one asked.  He was leaning forward in his seat, hands clasped between his knees, looking at her as though he truly wanted to know.  She wondered if he’d been trained to do that.

“No,” she said in a mildly defeated, almost embarrassed tone.  “We were...we were arguing.  He was late from work.  I thought he’d been out drinking.  Dinner was cold…”  Her throat cut her off again and she tried to clear it.  “Stupid thing to fight about, I guess, in retrospect.”  The men across from her said nothing, and she was grateful.  She didn’t want to answer more questions about the idiotic fights of married couples.  “I was doing the dishes and he…”  what had he done?  He’d been trying to end the fight, she remembered that much.  “He was talking and there was a loud crash in the back yard.  We thought it was raccoons, but…”

“But it wasn’t.”  The kind one again.  “He went out alone?”

Sharon nodded and glanced towards the kitchen.

“He was only out there a few minutes, and then he started…”  She swallowed down a lump in her throat.  “I’ve never heard him make a noise like that.  I’ve never heard  _ anyone  _ make a noise like that.  It was...like screaming but wrong somehow.  It wasn’t like he was yelling in fear it was like something was forcing the sound out of him.  That doesn’t even sound like it makes sense, but that’s what I thought.  I went running out expecting...I don’t know what I was expecting.”

The kind one glanced at his partner, a look that seemed to carry some meaning that Sharon couldn’t decipher.  The shorter man fixed her with his stern gaze.

“And you didn’t see anyone or anything with him out in the yard?”

Sharon shook her head.

“I couldn’t see him from the kitchen, but when I got outside there was no one there.” Suddenly the strangeness of his question sank in and she looked at him in mild confusion.  “What do you mean some _ thing? _ ”

“Had he been acting oddly at all, before this?” the man asked, ignoring her question.  “Strange dreams?  Talking funny?  Losing time?  Anything at all?”  

“Anything you can tell us, no matter how strange it might seem, will help us understand his mental state leading up to the accident,” his partner jumped in as if to clarify.

Sharon thought for a long moment, trying to find something in her memory that might fit with what the two men seemed to be trying to discover, but she could only shake her head.  “There’s nothing.  He was the same as he’s always been.”

The two men shared another look, and Sharon stiffened defensively on instinct, but they did not question her further.

“Do you mind if we take a look at your back yard?” the stern one asked, his expression softer now, as though he’d gotten what he needed and could move on to other things.

“Not at all,” she said, some remnant of her hostess voice from a hundred dinner parties and backyard barbeques surfacing as she stood to show them out the back door.  She balked at the threshold, however, not quite able to step outside back there again.  “It happened over there,” she said, indicating a back corner, where the trashcans sat, much as they had the night of the accident, one still on its side.

“Thank you, Mrs. Stanton,” the kind one said, lingering long enough to make her think, for a moment, that he really was grateful for her help.  Silly thing to think.  He was an insurance agent after all. For all she knew, they were going to use whatever they found back there to say they didn’t have to pay for his care anymore.  But she couldn’t help but think that this man was sincere.  He had a good look about him.  She nodded, and ducked back into the kitchen, not wanting to watch them poke around inside the worst moment of her life.


	4. Chapter 4

Outside, the air was damp.  A storm coming, maybe.  Sam glanced up at the sky quizzically, but the overhanging clouds didn’t seem particularly threatening.  A summer storm maybe, that would blow itself out in an hour or two, once it finally committed to the thing.  They were lucky, he supposed, to have gotten here before it hit.  If there was anything to be found in the back yard, and he had his doubts with so many days between them and the incident, then it would surely have been lost in the deluge.  

Dean had made a B-line for the back fence, but Sam lingered at the back door, taking in the whole yard, looking for things that might not have been so obvious.  The back fence was tall, and there was no gate leading into the alley beyond.  If Mr. Stanton had been attacked by something, it was a something that didn’t need a door.  That meant incorporeal, or something strong enough to do a straight leap over the fence.  The tree blocked the back corner, but only barely.  If whatever it was had stepped to either side by even an inch, Mrs. Stanton would have seen it.  Granted, it had been dark.  But it was still something to consider.  He added it to his mental list of traits to research later.  Strong.  Insubstantial.  Maybe even invisible.  Didn’t narrow it down a great deal, but perhaps something else back here would.

Sam stepped off the small, concrete terrace, barely 4 feet square, that extended from the house’s back door into the slightly damp grass of the yard.  He felt the ground give beneath his feet.  Maybe there’d been more rain here in the past few days than he’d realized.  He should have checked the weather before coming out here, then he would have at least known if checking the back yard was a waste of time.  Still, they were here now.  Couldn’t hurt to look.

“Find anything?” he called to Dean, stepping around the tree.  Dean was crouched down on the ground beside the fallen trash can, looking at something intently, but only looking.

“Maybe.”  He motioned Sam down beside him and he obliged, sinking down into a squat beside his brother and following his gaze towards the ground.  “What d’you think that is?”

On the ground, pressed into the mud, was a large pawprint.  Larger than anything Sam had ever seen, at least when it came to animals.  The toes were wide, and the pad seemingly thick.  It was almost dog like in it’s shape, but there was no evidence of claws, and it was definitely too wide to be any kind of wolf.  He wasn’t even certain this area  _ had  _ wolves.  Coyotes maybe.  Definitely nothing large enough to make something that big, at least not in the canine family.

“Looks like a cat paw,” he said after a moment’s though, slightly incredulous despite his own reasoning.  It was just so massive.  He shot Dean an amused glance.  “Feeling the urge to sneeze?”

Dean gave him an eye roll and reached forward to prod at the pawprint.  It went down deep, and he grimaced.

“Can’t tell if the thing is heavy enough to make a print that size or if the ground was just soft when it pushed off.  What do you think?  Mountain Lion?”

“Maybe,” Sam said, considering.  “Would certainly be strong enough to jump over the fence without being seen, particularly if it’s got this wide a base.  Must be massive though.”

“So maybe this isn’t our thing after all.”  Dean looked disgruntled at the very idea.

“Well it’s not like mountain lions are known for driving people insane,” Sam argued, sarcasm working its way into his tone.  “Could be this doesn’t have anything to do with what happened to Mr. Stanton.”  Though that was unlikely, and they both knew it.  In their line of work coincidences were few and far between.  If a massive animal print showed up at the scene of the crime, then they were probably looking for some kind of massive animal.  Sam filed it away with his other information.

“Local game warden might know something.”  Dean poked at the print again, as if he expected it to divulge more information than it already had.  “Maybe somebody’s seen the thing in action.”

Sam nodded and slapped his brother on the shoulder.  “Sounds like a plan.”


	5. Chapter 5

Night was falling early.  The storm that Sam had predicted was rolling in, much thicker than he’d anticipated.  He leaned forward in the passenger seat to look up at the gathering thunderheads with concern as Dean drove down the road.  Their motel was just outside of town in a small pocket of civilization carved out of the surrounding woods.  A motel 8, a gas station with a fast food joint attached, and little else.  Dean liked it that way.  As often as Sam had pointed out that they could find places just as safe closer to town, he always felt a little bit better if there was some distance between them and the main drag and Sam wasn’t about to argue with him about it.  Wasn’t worth the fight.  They’d had enough bullshit arguments lately that it just wasn’t worth adding where they were going to sleep to the list.

Thunder rumbled ominously in the distance, growing in volume and seeming to echo off the surrounding mountains, making the hair stand up on the back of his neck.  Storms in cities, he could handle.  They were tame things.  Winds trying to move the mountain.  Out west, on the flatter areas, they had the power of a train rushing at them, but they always went by just as fast.  Here in the narrow hollows and crevices of the Kentucky mountains, the storm felt like nothing so much as a great crouching beast, waiting for its moment.  Sam leaned back in his seat, his jaw tense.

“Not afraid of a little thunder, are you, Sammy?” Dean teased, catching the rigidity of his brother’s body language out of the corner of his eye.

“Just wondering if the roof is gonna cave in on us tonight, that’s all,” he grumbled, without looking at Dean.  He didn’t want to see the teasing grin he knew he’d get.  If nothing else, Sam was certain he was about to have a sleepless night.  Dean’s ability to sleep at the drop of a hat, wherever he might be, was a skill Sam had never really captured.  He’d gotten better at it, sure.  But there were too many things waiting in his head for him to ever shut his eyes with complete confidence.  He wondered, sometimes, how Dean dealt with the dreams, if he even had them.  All the shit they’d been through...all the hell they’d gone through, both literal and figurative...how did he manage to sleep at night as if it wasn’t all there, just waiting for its moment to shine?

The rain began to fall in a violent, yet somehow half-hearted sort of way.  It slashed across their windshield in random bursts as if it hadn’t quite committed to storming just yet.  The sound was soothing in its own way.  If the thunder broke early, then the patter of rain on  a rooftop  _ could _ be a catalyst for a good night’s sleep, assuming his joke about the roof caving in didn’t prove to be prophetic.

Dean saw her before Sam did.  A muttered exclamation, cut short.  The car swerved sideways and the trees outside Sam’s window whipped past, too close, merging into a solid wall of dirt and bark.  They might as well have been a solid barrier at this speed, but they didn’t hit them.  The car tipped sideways as they hit the ditch at the side of the road, the wheels sinking into mud so thick the car came to a jarring stop, skidding in the wet earth a good ten feet before slamming to a halt.  Sam took in a deep breath, trying to put order to the things that had just happened.

There’d been a woman in the road.  He’d barely seen her but she’d been there.  Long black hair, or maybe it was just that dark because it was wet.  Strange clothes…

The passenger side door was pressed too close to the rise of the hillside, but Dean was already moving.  The driver’s side door opened and his brother clambered out, giving Sam room to slide across the seat and onto the street.  They both turned towards where they’d seen her, jogging back to the place where they’d gone off the road, but there was no one to be seen.

“You saw her, right?” Dean snapped, already in hunter mode, his eyes scanning the road, the surrounding trees, even flashing up towards the sky.  Sam shook wet hair out of his eyes.

“Yeah, I saw her.  You didn’t hit her?”

“Course I didn’t hit her.”  He sounded insulted, but Sam felt it had been a fair question.  With as slick as the road had gotten in such a short amount of time, even the best driver might have clipped her.

Sam spun in a small circle, looking for signs of her, and his brother did the same, moving in opposition.  Even without immediate danger, Sam always felt better with Dean at his back.  It felt natural.  Safe and protected.  The rain was coming down harder now, reducing his visibility, but still he looked.  No blood on the road.  No sign of her anywhere.

Movement caught the corner of his eye and Sam turned sharply.  His brother’s name came out of his mouth, more as a reaction than in any effort to convey information.  At the edge of the trees, some twenty feet down the road, barely visible in the growing downpour, a large feline body was slipping into the trees.  It paused, as though it sensed their attention.  Sam couldn’t quite see it’s head, losing it in the shadow of the trees.  He squinted, trying to bring it into focus, and felt a spike of pain go through his temple.  A migraine coming on?  He shook his head to clear it and looked again, but the long, tawny body was gone.

“Was that a…?

“Think so,” Dean said.  “Think it’s our mystery lion?”   


“Kind of a big coincidence if it’s not, don’t you think?”  Sam gave Dean a knowing look.  They shared their belief on coincidences.  “We chasing?”

Dean hesitated for a moment, and Sam knew he wanted to say yes, but finally, water dripping down his face, he shook his head.

“No way we can follow it in this, just get ourselves killed.  Sides, might really just be a cougar, they have those around here don’t they?”

“I’m not sure.  I think so.”  But Sam didn’t feel confident.  Dean was right, though.  By the time they got their weapons out of the trunk, the thing would be long gone, and there was no hope of following a trail in the storm.  They’d have to try in the morning, and hope there was something to pick up.

“If that thing messed up my car…”  Dean turned in a huff and stomped off back down the road.  Sam was less concerned.  The impala might need a wash after this but he didn’t think it’d sustained any real damage.  Still, it worried him to leave the road.  There was a missed chance here, and he felt it.  A woman in the road...a mountain lion in the middle of a rainstorm...it all went away into his mental filing cabinet.  There would be answers, he just needed a chance to put things in order.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 


	6. Chapter 6

The storm had blown itself out by morning, exactly as Sam had thought it might.  The world had a grayish green hue to it and smelled of wet earth and foliage.  It wasn’t an unpleasant smell, exactly, but it was very thick.  The oppression of the storm hadn’t quite left them, though it was trailing away bit by bit as the sun burned away the wetness.  In the shade of the motel awning, the day was still cool, almost chilly.  But out on the road, puddles steamed in the sunlight.

“We’d cover more ground if we split up,” he said, logically, evenly, trying not to look directly at his brother.  Baby had a scratch on the passenger side door and he’d been grumpy about it all morning.  It wasn’t anything he couldn’t buff out, but that didn’t make it any less of bone of contention .  Even now, Sam could practically see him fuming about it, grinding his teeth and looking for someone to blame just as an outlet.  

“In any other town, sure,” Dean groused.  “But in this middle of the woods crap hole, it’d take twice as long to come pick you up after I dropped you somewhere.  Let’s just get out there, kill the thing, and get the hell out of here.”  Sam resisted the urge to sigh.

“You know there’s probably nothing to follow out there in the woods, right?  That storm washed everything away, I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a mini landslide on that ditch we crashed into by now.”  He thought they should go directly into town, start asking questions, but his brother was determined.  Whoever the woman, or cat, or whatever she’d been was, she was apparently taking sole blame for the state of the car, and perhaps that was fair.  Didn’t make it any more likely that they were going to find evidence in a freshly flooded forest.

“Just get in the car.”  Dean was already moving and the set of his shoulders told Sam everything he needed to know.  His brother was going to be difficult, likely for the rest of the day, unless they could find something worth looking into.  His brother needed the hunt and, sometimes, that worried Sam.  It wasn’t exactly a healthy reaction to stress, but then what about their lives could even by the loosest definitions be considered healthy?  Sam shook his head, and followed his brother to the car.

The road was still rain slick but already the heat of the day was making itself felt, burning away the moisture and filling the air with a humid stickiness.  Sam hated weather like this.  He was already sweating, and the Impala’s air conditioning had never been that awesome to begin with.  He shifted uncomfortably.  At least they weren’t wearing the suits.  Yet.

They crested a small hill and Sam gazed at the road ahead in concern.  At the bottom of the low rise, an ambulance was parked beside the road, flanked by two police cars and what appeared to be a rather small news van.  The occupants sat around on the hoods and trunks of their cars, as though waiting.

“Isn’t that where we ran off the road last night?”  Sam looked at his brother, brows drawing together in worry.  Maybe there had been a woman after all.

“Yeah,” his brother said simply, annoyance in his tone.  Clearly he wasn’t over the Impala’s brush with disaster just yet. Wordlessly, Sam flicked open the glove box and began digging through the IDs and badges inside.  

“We’ve only got Wyoming,” he said regretfully, holding out a Park Ranger badge for his brother.  Dean took it without looking, but the corners of his mouth dragged down.  They’d made FBI and insurance badges for this job, but neither of them had thought to include the park system in their prep.  Rookie move, and Sam could tell it frustrated Dean to no end.  Little mistakes like that got under his skin, and soured an already poor mood.

They pulled to a stop just ahead of the parked vehicles and got out.  His brother walked with an air of authority that Sam had always envied to a certain degree.  Even when they’d been teenagers, he’d had that walk.  Dean could do anything.  Go anywhere.  Be anyone.  Sam had always wished he could be like that, and it wasn’t something that had ever really gone away, just evolved.  He followed a step behind his brother, no less confident, perhaps, but he knew, as he always knew, that it wouldn’t be him they zeroed in on as the defacto leader.

“Everything all right here, boys?” Dean asked, his tone overly conversational.  He was almost smiling, damn smug bastard.  Sam supressed his own smile.  At least his brother was in his element for the time being.

“And you are?” asked the closest police officer, a portly man in his 50’s.  He gave a sneer of unimpressed distaste, but he didn’t seem to doubt the boys authority.  He had already straightened up, rising from his half perch on the trunk of his squad car.  He exuded the sort of annoyance that usually came from one department stepping on the toes of another, something the boys were far too familiar with.  Dean’s smile, if anything, grew more pronounced, as he produced his badge.  Sam followed suit, presenting his own in a mirror gesture.

“Ranger’s Frehley and Nicks.  Thought you boys might need a little help out here.”  He gave a not so subtle glance down at the officer’s prodigious midsection.  The man’s indignation grew.

“You  _ boys  _ are a little far from home aren’t you?” he asked, squinting at the badges in front of him and giving Dean a glare for good measure.

“Vacation.”  Dean offered no further explanation, and stepped around the man with obvious authority.  “There some kind of accident?” he asked of the group in general.  “Hikers?”  Logical, since there were no other cars to be seen on the narrow road.  Sam hung back, watching his brother work, but more than that, watching the people around him.  As they focused on Dean, it gave Sam a chance to read their expressions, their body language.  Sometimes, he’d found, there were tells to be seen, and like any good poker player, Dean was a master at bringing them out.

“Just one.”  A younger man, maybe a cadet just along for the ride, spoke up, and Dean turned to him, waiting for more.  “Mr. Jeffries.  Looks like a mountain lion got him.”  The kid’s face twinged ever so slightly.  “He has a store in town.  Used to sell the kids bags of candy for a dollar after school.  He’s...was...a good guy.”  

“Is that common?” Sam spoke up from the outskirts of the group.  “Mountain lion attack?”  He gave his brother a significant look.  For all they knew, the lion they’d seen the night before might have been the same one to kill Mr. Jeffries.  From what little he knew about the animals, he didn’t think there were usually a large number in one location.  Had they been just steps away from saving a man’s life, and let it go?

“Not really,” the older officer shook his head.  “You hear about sightings and what not, campers and tourists, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an attack around here.  Up in the woods, maybe.  We have campers go missing about every year.  Sometimes they turn up.  But it’s what you expect when people go out in the woods when they’re not prepared for it, you know?  Cougar this close to town though?  That’s something I’ve never seen.”

“Jim’s gonna want to organize a hunt, once word gets out,” the cadet spoke up, looking around the group with an expression that said this wasn’t the first time.  Dean looked confused.

“Who’s Jim?”

“Local ‘big game hunter’,” the cadet said, using air quotes and rolling his eyes.  “Thinks he’s this ultimate survivalist, always bragging to the tourists in town, but we all know the biggest thing he ever caught on his own was a cold.”

“So he’s never killed a mountain lion before?” Sam asked, to clarify, and the cadet shook his head while the group around chuckled in amusement.

“Said he did once,” the boy supplied.  “Put it right up in his living room.  Then his wife let slip that he got a good deal on it from some taxidermy website in California.”  The group’s amusement grew and Dean met Sam’s eyes.  This was getting them nothing.  But, in the back of his mind, there was that nagging suspicion.  There were no coincidences in their line of work.  The pawprint in the back yard...the woman in the road...this man’s death.  They were connected, he was sure of it.

The levity in the group came to an abrupt halt as a pair of paramedics emerged from the trees, awkwardly carrying a gurney between them, trailed by two more police officers.  The body bag on the gurney was a sobering sight.  No matter how many times Sam saw death, he never felt completely desensitized to it.  Part of him hoped he never would be.  It meant he was still human.  The gurney was loaded into the ambulance in relative silence.  A few of the police officer’s shared quiet words with the paramedics and then, by seemingly unspoken accord, they all headed back to their cars.  

“Hope the rest of your vacation’s a little brighter than this,” the older officer patted Dean’s shoulder in passing, his previous animosity seemingly forgotten.  He slid into his squad car and, one by one, they started to pull away.

“Think it’s connected?” Sam asked, as they headed back to their own car.

“I dunno.”  Sam glanced at his brother in mild surprise.  “Maybe it’s just an animal attack.  I mean that guy maybe went nuts all on his own.  Coincidence.” That word again.  “I dunno.”

“The sheriff said they don’t usually get cougars down this close to town, which means the one in the Stanton’s back yard was even more unusual.  Come on, Dean, we’ve looked into less.”   


“Yeah,” Dean said, non-committal, and slid into the car.  “I just wish there was more to go on, that’s all.


	7. Chapter 7

The Irving Game and Wildlife Commission office was a small building that had seen better days.  Small, square, and forgettable, those were its chief attributes.  Even from the outside, the place looked a little dark and a little damp.  Sam and Dean surveyed the building with some distaste.

“You’d think this far in the woods, the place would have a better office,” Dean grumbled.  

“Maybe it doesn’t get as many hikers as you’d think,” Sam reasoned.  “We’re not exactly close to any of the landmarks, I don’t think.  Probably only gets popular around hunting season.”

Dean made a face and Sam chuckled quietly to himself.  His brother was no fan of regular hunting.  Where was the challenge, he’d argued, in shooting freaking Bambi?  The things they hunted at least had the chance to fight back.  They at least stood a chance of taking them down with them.  That danger was part of the thrill.  Nevermind that Sam didn’t really think “thrill” was a good way to feel about what they did, but there was no point in arguing with Dean over it.  His brother was a hunter, through and through, and no amount of mother henning from his brother was going to change that.

Inside, the building didn’t do much to alleviate first impressions.  The carpet was old, probably dating at least to the 60’s with its faded orange and green pattern.  The chairs and tables didn’t look much younger.  Overall, there was a slight hint of mildew, kept at bay with what had to be at least a gallon of fabreeze.

A young woman stood behind the desk and she smiled brightly as they entered, but not brightly enough to take focus away from the way she hastily stowed her phone out of sight.  Apparently Sam had been right.  They didn’t get many visitors in this office at this time of year, clearly, and he could hardly begrudge her a round or two of Candy Crush.  He stepped up to the desk at the same time as his brother, and both produced their park ranger badges in a well practiced move of synchronicity.

“Ma’am, if it’s alright, we’d like to ask you a couple of questions about the area.”  Sam took lead on this one, he usually did when things needed a more humane touch.  His brother would mock him for it later but they both knew a well placed smile and a slight tilt of the head would get them more information out of some people than confidence and intimidation.  And in that department, Sam always had been and always would be the strongest.

“Sure,” she said, her voice as bright as her smile, but a faint pinkness covered her cheeks at being called Ma’am by someone who was older than her and, if the dart of her eyes was any indication, someone she found attractive.  Sam didn’t really preen.  He wasn’t vain enough for it.  But he could see the smirk on his brother and resisted the urge to roll his eyes.  “I’m not sure how much help I’ll be.  I mostly just answer phones and file papers.  Dave’s out to lunch, he’d probably be the better person to talk to.”   


“We just want some general information,” Sam assured her, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the high desk.  The movement brought him down from his towering height and put him more on her eye level.  “You heard about the accident out on 1571?”

The girl’s face fell and she glanced down at the counter top.  Word traveled fast in small towns.  Given that an animal was suspected, it was no surprise it had already made it to her ears.

“Yeah.  Steve Jeffries.  Awful thing.”

“It is,” Sam nodded his head, giving her a sympathetic look.  “Did you know him?”

“Everyone knows everyone around here,” she said, as though it were obvious.  “I didn’t see him every day or anything, but he was always kind of around.  Helped fix my dad’s fence last year when someone plowed through the front yard with their car.  Good guy.”

“Seems to be the general consensus.”  Sam ducked his head, looking down as though showing respect for the man.  “Police said it looked like a mountain lion attack.  That’s pretty rare isn’t it?”  He added a note of incredulity to his voice, as though asking her to share the latest gossip with him, rather than discuss the death of someone she had known.

“Oh, yeah, totally, there’s no way a cougar took him out.”  Said with such conviction.  She shook her head and made a face as if she didn’t believe it for a second.

“What makes you say that?” Sam asked, genuinely intrigued by her reaction.  The girl looked at him surprised and perhaps a bit skeptical.

“Thought you guys were with the parks department.  Everyone knows there’s no cougars around here anymore.  I mean, they make kids write reports on it in biology.”

“We’re a bit out of our depth here,” Dean stepped in, giving her his most winning smile.  “Not many mountains in Wyoming.”  Sam hoped that was true.  He wasn’t entirely certain but it seemed plausible.  Wyoming was one of those flat, square states in the middle after all.  Wasn’t it?

“Well, I mean…” she hesitated as if not sure how to put her thoughts concisely.  “The Kentucky Mountain Lion is basically extinct.  Like, I think there’s a few reserves that have a couple, but that’s about it.  They don’t really feature on the endangered and extinct lists cause they’re just kind of a regional extinction.  They still exist, just mostly in California.  But Kentucky hasn’t had a cougar population in the wild in something like 60 years.  So if Mr. Jeffries  _ was  _ taken out by one, it wasn’t some wild animal.  It was someone with an illegal exotic pet, and that’s just not the sort of thing you can keep quiet in a town like this.  Everyone’s in everyone’s business, they’d have found it a long time ago before it was even big enough to hurt anyone.”

Sam stood silent for a moment, absorbing the information.  He cast a look at his brother, brow raised in question, but Dean was impassive.  He didn’t like the information, that much was clear, but Sam suspected it had less to do with the information itself as it was that it was negative.  If true, this confirmed their suspicions.  It was definitely their kind of job.  But it also meant that they still had no real idea what they were up against, aside from a handful of facts.  Creature with claws.  Insanity.  Child abduction.  It wasn’t a lot to go on.  Still, Sam left “lion” in his list of attributes, as well as the mysterious woman in the road.  They all fit together somehow, he just had to figure out how.


	8. Chapter 8

“There a reason we couldn’t do this during the day?” Dean groused, pulling  a flashlight from the trunk of the Impala and sliding it through his belt.  He reached for a gun, tucking it into the back of his jeans, just in case.  What good a handgun might do against a big cat, Sam wasn’t sure, but he wasn’t going to begrudge his brother his safety blankets.  He picked up his own gun and flashlight.  Couldn’t be too careful

“We’re hunting a mountain lion,” Sam said calmly, stepping back as his brother slammed the trunk and locked it.  “Best time to spot one is around dawn or dusk, so unless you want to get up  _ really  _ early tomorrow, this is our best bet.”  Sam turned his attention towards the woods, stepping off the road and across the narrow ditch that separated it from the treeline.  Mud squelched under Sam’s boot.  Around him, the woods were getting steadily darker as the sun sank behind the hills.  There was sticky heat around them that made his shirt cling to his back and his hair hang in dank lengths around his face.  He brushed it back with one hand.

Moving forward, Sam scanned the ground for tracks, for marks on the trees, for anything that might help give them a direction, but there wasn’t much to be seen.  He doubted he’d have had more with the sun out.  The police and paramedics had obliterated anything that might have been useful as they tramped back and forth through the woods.

“Did you find anything worth mentioning?” Dean asked, more for conversation, Sam supposed, than a need for actual information.  The brothers had split up for most of the rest of the day and Sam had returned to the hotel to research while Dean canvassed town, asking questions, trying to find out if anyone had seen their mystery prey.  No one had.  Sam hadn’t had much more luck on the internet.  The search was simply too broad, and the only mountain lion myths he’d been able to dredge up were all from western Indian tribes.  At least so far.  There was something there, he thought, some overlap, but he hadn’t found it yet.  He needed more to go on.

“Not really.  A couple Apache stories.  Nothing that matches what we’re looking at here.  I’m thinking it might be some kind of shifter, maybe animal based instead of human.”  It was too easy an answer and Sam knew it.  A shifter, no matter what they turned into, didn’t cause insanity, at least not that either of them had ever seen.  And they didn’t take kids, though if they were human by default, maybe they just had a taste for them.  The thought made his skin crawl.

Ahead of them, Sam could see the bright yellow of the crime scene tape in the gathering gloom.  He turned his steps towards the squared off area.  In the clearing, a shuffle of leaves, the barest hiss of sound, warned them before they could see or be seen.  Someone was in the clearing.  The brothers, moving on singular instinct, split cleanly and silently and slid behind trees on either side of the path.  It wasn’t much cover but, in the growing darkness, it might well have been enough.  Sam looked at his brother, asking a silent question.  How to proceed.  Which way to go.  He deferred to his brother in moments like these, watching Dean’s back.  That was his place.  That was his job.

Dean jerked his head towards the clearing and Sam nodded.  He waited, quietly, to see if there would be another sound and, when none came, he slipped from behind his tree and over to another, closer to the clearing.  Opposite him, Dean did the same, moving further away from him.  They’d come at the stranger, whoever or whatever it was, from opposite sides.  He saw Dean reach for his gun, just in case.

Ahead, in the clearing, Sam heard that sound again.  The gentle, sliding hiss of fallen leaves slipping over each other.  He froze, almost held his breath, and waited.  

Sam heard Dean make his move and reacted instantly.  With instinct born of years at his brother’s back, Sam spun around the tree and drew his gun, aiming it directly at the center of the clearing just as Dean, across the clearing and slightly to the left, did the same.

A woman crouched in the middle of the clearing.  She did not react to their sudden appearance in any way that Sam could see.  Her hand was placed on the ground, as if feeling for something in the leaves.  Darkness was falling faster, and Sam had to squint to see her properly.  Her clothing was strange.  It seemed to be a tunic of some sort over pants, both of buttery leather the likes of which Sam had never seen anywhere but a museum.  The pants were fringed and beaded.  Down her back, her hair was twisted into a long braid, inky black in the gloom.  She rose slowly.  The clearing felt as if they had suddenly been plunged underwater.  Things moved slowly, the air seemed thick.  She turned to look at Sam.

For a moment, he couldn’t make sense of her features.  And then, reluctantly, as though his mind couldn’t rationalize what he saw, he realized she didn’t have any.  Her face was obscured, furred...the eyes too large the nose slanting.  A mask...she was wearing a mask.  The features were feline, with white circles around the eyes.  From the top sprang large, tufted ears, the tips of which looking a bit worse for wear as though she’d had the mask for quite some time.  It was a bobcat, looking back at him.  

The world resumed its proper speed.  One moment, the woman stood looking at him placidly.  The next, she was running through the trees ahead of him.  He almost forgot to pursue her.  His brother crashed through the trees ahead of him, so much faster.  Even with his longer stride, Sam had never been able to keep up with Dean when he got running.  It was like he’d been built for it.  But where Dean was built for speed, this woman was built for the woods.  She slipped between tree trunks like a deer in flight, changing course faster than they could hope to mimic.  They bounced off trunks, crashed into underbrush, and she drew further away from them.

Dean refused to give up.  The further their quarry drew away from them, the harder he ran, and Sam was barely able to keep up with him either.  Fearful of losing them  _ both  _ he pushed harder.  That push very nearly ended him.  Pushing out of the trees into what he thought was another clearing, the ground fell away at his feet.  Sam’s arms were up, pinwheeling as he attempted to stop his forward momentum.  His brother caught hold of him, one hand slamming into his chest, the other gripping the back of his shirt and dragging him away from the edge.  The two of them nearly keeled over, leaning over to put their hands on their knees and take great breaths of the too heavy, too thick air of the woods.  Sam could just see her, so far ahead of them now it seemed impossible.  And then she was gone.

“Damn it.”  Sam looked over at Dean and though for a moment that his brother might lay down right there on the ground to gasp for air.  He looked back towards where the woman had disappeared.  He edged closer to the drop off and peered down, wondering how close to disaster he had come.  It wasn’t a far fall, but it would have been enough to break bones, coming into it the way he had.  The sides of the rocky terrain fell perhaps twelve feet, little more than a very steep bank, into a narrow stretch of muddy brown water, almost black in the falling night.  The distance to the other side had to be at least as wide.  So how had she made it?  She had to be some kind of olympic jumper to make that distance.  Or...

“We’re never gonna find her in the dark,” Sam said.  Particularly not if they were going to have to find a way across the little river.  “We should head back to the car before we get stuck out here.”  Already, they were in danger of just that.  Turning around, he was only vaguely aware of which direction the road lay in.  Night had well and truly fallen, and he’d dropped his flashlight somewhere behind them in the woods.  Dean, luckier than his brother, turned his on.

“Yeah,” he grumbled, dusting himself off a bit.  Sam could just make out a streak of mud along one side where Dean must have bit it and hit the ground.  “What a BITCH,” he yelled into the empty trees.  That wasn’t exactly fair, Sam thought.  They had no idea who the woman might be or what she had been doing there.  If she was what they were hunting, she certainly hadn’t shown any of the aggressive signs he’d have expected, given what they’d already seen.  But he let Dean vent.  It was always better to let Dean vent, particularly when faced with a long walk back to the car in the dark.

“Come on,” he said, giving his brother a hard pat on the shoulder.  “We’ve got work to do.”


	9. Chapter 9

Sam was tired.  Midnight had come and gone and he was still reading.  Across the room, Dean was asleep sitting up on the bed by the far wall.  He’d made a valiant effort to help, but he’d gotten about as far as Sam had...endless pages of native american myths all concerning cats of one kind or another.  There were dozens.  Maybe hundreds.  But none of them matched what he was looking for.  If anything, cat spirits seemed to be beneficial to the people not just of this region, but most regions.  He’d been reading so long the words were starting to blur.

With a sigh, Sam clicked on the last link on the page of his latest search and got up while it loaded.  The slow motel internet was leaving a lot to be desired and certainly wasn’t helping matters.  He wanted coffee.  But more than that he wanted to call it a night.  Maybe he’d have more luck in the morning.  Maybe he would have some epiphany on a little bit of rest.  Or maybe whatever they were hunting would kill someone else and it would be his fault because he hadn’t been able to figure this out fast enough.  Sam had enough guilt weighing him down without adding the life of yet another stranger to it.

Sometimes, he and Dean talked about it.  Can’t take the blame for deaths you couldn’t have prevented, his brother always told him.  But it was crap, and they both knew it.  They both took the blame.  Always.  And no amount of  blasé bravado was going to change that.

Text finally began to appear on the page and Sam read slowly, wanting to make sure he was absorbing the words through his exhaustion fogged mind.  A warm feeling started in his chest as he read.  Maybe he was going to get some sleep tonight after all.

 

* * *

 

“Okay, so what’d you find?”  Dean was looking better this morning.  Less surely now that they apparently had some answers.  A path to follow.  A plan.  Or at least they would once Sam was able to get all his research out on the table.  He’d finally went to bed at about four in the morning, feeling much better about their situation all around.

“It’s an obscure myth.  Kind of buried.  I couldn’t even find the tribe it originated from, so for awhile I was just trying to verify it.  Could have been an urban legend.”

“Yeah, well, Urban Legends come from somewhere, we’ve seen that first hand.”

“We have, but I thought if I could pin down the origin, might be something we could use to kill it.”

“Well what  _ is  _ it?”  Dean fixed his brother with a quizzical stare as he swirled coffee in a plastic cup.

“It’s called an Ew’ah.  Or Wampus Cat in some places, though it looks like that’s also synonymous with the power to defeat it, sources differ.  It’s alternately called the demon of madness and the dream stealer.  Looks like it feeds largely on children and just seeing it can lead to permanent insanity.”

“Well that doesn’t track.  I mean we saw the thing and look at us, we’re fine.”

“Were we though?  I mean you felt it, right, when you saw it?  It was like...missing a step going downstairs or something.  Maybe we just weren’t close enough for it to really affect us.”

“That’s just great,” Dean rolled his eyes, annoyed.  “How are we supposed to kill it if we can’t get close to it?”

“Well, I’m getting to that.  There’s a story, it’s what I spent most of my time researching.  I think it has something to do with that woman we saw last night.”  Sam turned his laptop around to show Dean a painting he’d found.  It showed a young Native American woman, in a long, beaded dress.  Her black hair was tied back in a braid adorned with small stones and feathers.  Her face was hidden behind a mask made from the face of a bobcat.  Dean gave him a look over the top of the computer, asking wordlessly for more.

“I think she might have been this woman.  Running Deer.  There’s a whole story about her that’s completely unrelated to the Ew’ah’s origins.”

“Start from the beginning,” Dean said, his tone businesslike.  “What is the thing and where did it come from, do we know?”

“That story’s a lot older, relatively speaking.  I found a bunch of different versions of it credited to a bunch of different Cherokee tribes.  The story goes like this:  There was a young woman in the tribe who was outspoken and kind of rebellious.  Most of the stories talk about how she hadn’t found a husband yet, and the other women looked down on her for it.  One night she followed the men out of the camp in order to spy on them while they performed magic.  She disguised herself with a lion’s hide.  When she was discovered, they fused her with the lion skin so that she’d always be half woman, half cat, for eternity.”

“Real smart.  Make a monster that eats your children and drives people insane.”

“Well there’s no reference to any of that in the original stories.  It’s almost like they’re two different monsters, if it wasn’t for the amount of time that’s between them.  My guess?  It was kind of like a...unexpected side effect.  Magic goes bad, we’ve seen it happen.  Maybe she went insane and the magic warped that.”

“But kids?”  Dean asked, disgusted.

“Myths said she was unmarried.  Maybe she just wants a family.  We’ve seen spirits do that sort of thing before.”

“Yeah, alright, I can see that.  But how do we kill it?”

“That’s the thing,” Sam said, a touch regretful and concerned.  “I don’t think we can.  In all the stories there’s not one reference to a way to kill her.  Her suffering was meant to be eternal.  I mean, I’m not even certain there’s a  _ race  _ of these things, I think there might be just the one, and she’s been alive this long without anyone taking her down.  There’s only one story where she was “defeated” or “destroyed” but the details of what actually happened to her incredibly vague.”

“That have something to do with our mystery woman last night?”  Dean asked.  Sam nodded.  This part of the tale excited him, and he was hard pressed not to be too eager as he continued.  It was unlike anything they’d really come across before, and the novelty of it was a bit intoxicating.

“Running Deer, according to the myths.  Now her story starts sometime after the first one, there’s no real telling how long.  By the time her story starts, the Ew’ah is a monster that’s been plaguing the village for a long time.  Children would hear her cry and leave their beds in the middle of the night and never be seen again.  Men who went looking for her never came back.  So the chief called a war council, and they gathered together a group of hunters to go and kill the creature.  Now one of the men in the hunting party was called Great Fellow, and he was Running Deer’s husband.  She begged him not to go but he said he had no choice.  Now there’s a couple of different versions here that say she might have been pregnant, and that’s why he was so adamant to go.  He wanted to protect their future child.  Not all of them say that though, so it…”

“Point, Sammy.”

“Right, so, he goes.  And the whole party is gone for days and after awhile they’re just assumed dead, until Great Fellow comes wandering down out of the hills completely out of his mind, but at least alive.  The tribe didn’t know what to do with him so he was given simple tasks like berry picking and stuff.  He couldn’t recognize his wife.  She was basically a widow.  So she went to the chief and asked him to let  _ her  _ go and hunt the beast and avenge her husband.  They called another council and decided to let her try.  But they gave her a weapon to take with her.  A mask made from the preserved head of a bobcat.  The cat’s spirit was supposed to protect her from the creature.  I did a little digging into it and it looks like the cat spirit is largely considered feminine by most Cherokee tribes, but not all, so I guess that’s why they gave it to her but not one of their hunters.”

“And you think she’s the woman we saw in the woods last night.”  It wasn’t a question, but he gave Sam a raised brow sort of look, as if looking for verification.

“I do.”

“So...what...she failed I guess?”

“Well...not exactly.  The story isn’t exactly helpful after that.  Seems Running Deer went out into the woods to hunt the Ew’ah.  She confronted her at a stream, that’s one thing every single one of the stories has in common so I think it might be important somehow, just don’t know how yet.  Some stories say the Ew’ah was scared off by the mask.  Some say she was destroyed or that her power was turned back on her and she went mad.  Every single place I could find the story it had a different ending, so who knows what really happened.”

“Well, apparently one person does, if you’re right.”  He gave Sam a knowing look.

“Means we’ve gotta find that woman.”

“Yes we do.”

“But we don’t even know where to look for her.”  
“Well, we have a few things we can work with.  You said all the stories have her confronting the thing at water.  We lost _her_ over some water.  I think we start there, maybe follow the river up the direction we last saw her, see what happens.”

“It’s not a lot to go on,” Sam said doubtfully, “but it’s something.  We might want to get some camping gear.”

“Yeah.  But you ask me to sing campfire songs out there and I’m taking away your talking privileges.”

Sam chuckled.  “Sure.”


	10. Chapter 10

Setting out that day proved to be more difficult than either of the boys had expected.  As they drove into town, heading for the largest outdoor supply store they could find on the map, they found that they weren’t the only ones who’d decided to head there to gear up for an extended trek . A large group was gathered at the front of the store, mostly men, and they were squaring off against a much larger group of what appeared to be protestors.  Dean parked towards the back of the lot, clearly more concerned about the safety of his already abused car than whatever might be going on at the store, and the two got out.

“We’ve got to protect our community!” one man, seemingly the leader of the first group, shouted in the face of the protestors.  “There’s a dangerous animal out there.  It’s already killed one person.  Do you want to be next?  Or someone you love?  For all we know, the thing is rabid and needs to be put out of its misery!  We all heard what happened to Doug Stanton.  Sounds like rabies to me!”

“Oh shut it, Jim,” the woman opposite him spat.  “This was an accident, and you know it.  You talk about it like the poor thing had some kind of malicious intent.  It’s an  _ animal. _  And an endangered one, at that, and Doug doesn’t have rabies, stop talking outta your ass.  Whatever this animal did, you can’t just go up there and shoot it.  It needs to be captured, tagged, and maybe taken to a zoo or something, there are LAWS.”

“This is what I think of those laws!” Jim shouted back and raised a long shotgun on the air, gripping it by the barrel.  “We’re gonna make sure that thing doesn’t hurt anybody else!  And you’re not gonna stop us!”  He and his group began to shoulder their way through the crowd and the shouts from both side became unintelligible in their volume.  

“Well that’s just great,” Dean grumbled, almost under his breath.  “Civilians with guns.  A ton of fresh victims walking right into the damn thing’s territory.”   


“We’ve gotta take care of this before they get themselves killed.”  Sam watched the group of hunters pushing their way free and to their cars.  “We’re not gonna have a lot of time.”

“Let’s get what we came for then.”

The store, at least, was well stocked, and Sam made a hurried mental checklist of things they might need for roughing it in the woods for a couple of nights.  Backpack, pop tent, some food.  Both of them were perfectly capable of starting a fire on short notice so he skipped over the fire starters and other such luxuries and focused on loading up on dehydrated food.  Dean was going to be difficult if they were out in the woods too long.  He always was.  With that in mind, he grabbed a couple of cans of stew and beans.  They’d be heavier in the pack, but at least they might keep Dean happy for a night.  With any luck, they wouldn’t be out in the woods that long.

Dean, for his part, had headed to the gun racks at the back of the store to restock their ammo.  Sam wasn’t sure guns were going to do any good against this creature.  If it had lived in the modern world this long, then someone, somewhere, had to have taken a shot at it.  The local cougars hadn’t all up and died of their own accord, after all.  But still, it couldn’t hurt to have them, just in case.  If nothing else, maybe they would slow the thing down if it came at them.  At the last moment, Sam reached for a couple pairs of cheap, dark sunglasses and a little tub of Vaseline.  He had half an idea in his head.  If distance had dulled the thing’s power, maybe impaired vision might keep them safe a little longer.  If it came at them unawares, it might be their only chance.

The boys met back up at the checkout lane and Dean eyed the dehydrated food with mild disgust.

“Can’t believe people do this for  _ fun _ ,” he grumbled.  Sam chuckled quietly to himself but didn’t comment.  He rather liked camping after all, and Dean knew it.  But he could understand his brother’s distaste.  As ready as Dean was to do the job at all costs, he was also a man that liked his creature comforts, and Sam could hardly begrudge him that.  

“Got us some earplugs,” Dean added, almost as though he’d forgotten.  “If that thing was calling children, might need them.”

“Since when are we kids?” Sam gave his brother a rye look.

“We’re not.  But maybe it’s only calling kids cause that’s all it wants.  I don’t want to take the chance that it’s gonna change its mind.  Besides, we got no way of knowing if that’s all it can do to us.  Better safe than sorry.”

“Fair enough,” Sam said with a nod.  So dark, smeared glasses and earplugs.  Their senses were going to be so wonderful on this trip.  He hoped the thing would come right up to them and lay down to die because at this rate that was the only way they were going to take it down.

Sam followed his brother to the checkout lane, grabbing a couple of maps of the immediate area from a small brochure display beside the register.  He held them up for the girl at the register to see.

“Which one of these would be best for hiking South of town, off the highway?”

“You’re joining those idiots?” she asked, with annoyance in her voice.  “They’re gonna wind up shooting each other on accident, just you watch.  They’re not even wearing hunting vests.”  She eyed them skeptically.  “And neither are you.  Hope you don’t like that shirt cause it’s gonna have holes in it.”  

“We’ll take our chances,” Sam said with a tight smile, maps still held aloft.  He gave them a little shake for emphasis.  The girl sighed.

“This one,” she said, pulling one of the thinner maps from the stack.  “There aren’t many trails down that way so you don’t need all the tourist bullshit.”  She rang the map up with the rest of their purchases without further questions and Sam returned the others to their display.

 

*  * *

 

“Well she was a peach,” Dean said, his annoyance showing, as they exited the store.

“She’s not wrong, though,” Sam said fairly, glancing nervously at the group that still lingered off to one side of the parking lot.  They seemed to have dispersed to a small degree, but a small knot of them was still clustered around their cars talking quietly.  They weren’t going to be alone in the woods today, that was clear.  “Bunch of civilians with guns ready to shoot at anything that moves?  It’s not exactly the safest situation to be in.”

“We’ve been in worse,” Dean said dismissively as he popped the trunk and tossed their bags inside.  That Sam could agree with.  Didn’t mean he relished the idea of knowingly going into something that had disaster written all over it.  At the very least, he hoped the group would hold off another day while they got organized.  Closing the trunk, Dean spread their new map out and took a moment to look down on it, making sense of it as best he could.  Sam leaned over his shoulder, putting a finger down near the highway.

“That’s where we saw it,” he said, drawing a line with his finger from that point to a point further into the woods, “and that’s where the body was found and we saw the other woman.”

“Or same woman, we’re still not sure she’s not the bad guy here,” Dean corrected.  Sam wasn’t so sure, but he didn’t argue.

“In the legend, she’s found near water,” he said, musingly, and traced his finger further along the map, stopping at a blue line.  “This is the river where we lost her I think.”

“Seems like as good a place to start as any,” Dean said.  He put a hand down on the map, following the river to where it curved through what looked to be a more mountainous area, measuring the distance with thumb and forefinger.  “It’s only a couple of miles between it and the hills.  If I was a kid eating monster, I’d want a place to hole up.”  He glanced at Sam for agreement, and Sam nodded his head.

“Makes sense.  We start there and follow it to high ground, see what we can find.”

“Sounds like a plan.”  Dean started folding the map, incorrectly, and thrust it at Sam.  He chuckled, shaking his head, and started to fold it up properly as he headed for the passenger side.


	11. Chapter 11

Hours had passed.  The sun was hot and there was no respite from the humidity as the boys walked along the side of the small river.  At times, the water had narrowed to barely more than a trickle, but here it was wide and flat, barely a foot deep almost all the way across as far as Sam could tell, but flowing smoothly over little pebbles.  It would have been a peaceful place had it not been for the omnipresent heat and the swarms of mosquitoes.  

Dean was annoyed with their progress.  He didn’t have to say anything for Sam to read it in the set of his shoulders.  As the day had begun to wane, Sam had insisted on the glasses and earplugs, and, despite the latter being Dean’s idea, he could tell it made him more frustrated than before to be without his senses.  Still, they’d been doing this long enough not to take stupid chances, and he left them on.

With their hearing impaired as it was, neither of the brothers heard the family before they nearly tripped over them.  A man, a woman, and two little boys, splashing in a secluded curve of the creek where the bank was rocky and cut down on the mosquitos rising from the mud.  The woman gave a muffled scream at the sight of them, and the children ran to her.  Sam hurriedly pointed his gun at the sky, raising his other hand, as Dean’s gun point dropped towards the water.

“Woah, woah, sorry,” he said, as quickly as he could, “we didn’t mean to scare you.”

The father was speaking but Sam couldn’t hear him.  Dean, seemingly having the same thought, reached up to yank the earplugs from his ears.  They dangled from their plastic cord around his neck.  Sam followed suit, though he left his sunglasses firmly on.

“You and your family need to pack up and get out of here,” Dean was saying, his voice firm, authoritative.  “There’s a dangerous animal in the area and, for your safety, we’re gonna need to get you out of here as fast as we can.”  He glanced upward at the sky, pushing his sunglasses up enough to squint at the fading light.  “You know what, no time.  Grab what you can carry and let’s go.”  

Sam followed suit, glancing at the sky.  The light was fading as the sun slid behind the low mountains.  Dusk...the creature would be moving, if their research was accurate.  Sam looked back at the man, standing in front of his children, trying to protect them from entirely the wrong threat.

“We’re not going anywhere with you!” the man shouted, a bit too loud in his surprise and fear.  Sam’s face pulled tight and he resisted the urge to bark at the man.  He was protecting his family.  It was admirable.  But they were wasting time.

“We don’t have time to explain, you’re going to have to trust us.  Your family is in danger. We have to move.”

Somewhere, far too close at hand, there was a sound.  It wasn’t a sound that Sam could appreciate with his ears, it was almost like he heard it coming before it ever reached him.  A sort of high pitched ringing, muffling all sounds around it, preceded it, and then he heard it.  Really heard it.  It wasn’t human.  But it was.  It was a wailing cry, a cry of grief and despair that he’d heard so many times in his life, on so many black days.  But it held a growl of anger, of aggression.  It was an animal, but it wasn’t.  

Sam didn’t remember falling to the ground, but his knees were wet.  He looked in shock at the water beneath him, unable to make sense of it.  His vision seemed to throb, but the sound was gone.  He shook his head, willing his vision to clear, but dizziness overtook him and he shut his eyes.

“Dean…” he said the name like a talisman against whatever had happened, whatever was coming, but his voice echoed in a way it shouldn’t have and he wasn’t entirely certain if he’d spoken aloud or not.  He fumbled with one hand for his earplugs, feeling them skitter out from beneath his fingertips against his chest.  “Dean…”

Sam opened his eyes and searched for his brother, finding the hazy shape of his slumped shoulders off to his right.  He, too, had fallen, clutching his head.  Sam turned, looking at the family, fear pushing him to focus.  He had to protect them.  There were children... 

The father had fallen as well, and his wife and children clutched at him in fear.  The boys stood rigidly at his side, a glassy look to their eyes, heads tilted back as if listening,  but his wife had her head up, turning this way and that, searching for the source of the strange sound.

“What’s going on?!” she shouted, at both of them, neither of them, turning to look behind her.

“Get your kids and run!”  Dean’s voice.  Strained but powerful.  Good.  Sam was hesitant to test his own voice just at the moment.  His fingers closed around one of the earplugs and he managed to jam it into his left ear.  It was the better one, after all.  The one always turned slightly away from the gun when he fired.  He fumbled for the second earplug, just as the ringing began in his head again.  He wasn’t sure if he could stay conscious through a second onslaught and, though it wasn’t exactly a sound just yet, he could swear it was closer.

Something large slammed into him from behind sending him spinning down into the shallow river bank with a grunt of pain as lines of fire erupted along one side of his body.  He could hear the start of the cry through the water, mercifully muffled.  Sam didn’t move.  If he pulled his head out of the water, the thing might well knock him out.  The sunglasses had fallen from his head and floated in the water just in front of him and he grabbed them with sluggish fingers, jamming them onto his face, and turned, as best he could.  The man lay face first in the water, an ominous darkness spreading out from his body.  Sam couldn’t tell if he was breathing, and he didn’t have time to dwell on it.  He could see the creature now.

It was massive, even allowing for his prone position.  A tawny lion, but larger than any that had been seen in at least a few million years.  It loomed over the mother and her children.  The woman did not run.  She didn’t even try.  She stood over her children with a horror stricken face, putting herself bodily between them and the creature.  Sam’s knees felt weak, he’d dropped his gun somewhere in the water, but still he tried to rise.

Something whistled past his ear before he even had time to dodge it and an arrow embedded itself in the creature’s shoulder.  The lion yowled in pain, the sound giving Sam a lurching feeling in his stomach as though he might vomit, but he did not fall again.  It spun, and he could see it’s face, just barely, through smudged and darkened lenses of his glasses.  His head hurt...it hurt so terribly bad.  He looked away before the creature did, though the moment couldn’t have been longer than the span of a heartbeat.  Another arrow whistled through the air, thunking into the mud at the creature’s feet.  It hissed and reared onto its hind legs, easily taller than him by at least a head.  

A third arrow found its home in the creature’s chest, and, though it yowled in pain, it did not seem overly harmed.  Dropping back to it’s feet, it spun and bounded off into the woods, crashing through the underbrush like a small elephant.

Shaking, woozy, and losing blood, though he could not even turn to see how bad the damage truly was, Sam fell forward into the water, darkness taking him at last.


	12. Chapter 12

Sam awoke to the flickering of firelight on the wall beside him.  He was laying half on his side, a mildly uncomfortable position, and his shirt seemed to be missing, but the necessity of it became apparent the moment he tried to roll to his back.  Pain erupted in hot, angry lines and he hissed in discomfort.  It wasn’t the worst pain he’d ever had, but he could tell by the heat of it that it was probably not something he wanted to look too closely at.  Dean must have stitched him up.

Dean…

Pain be damned, Sam rolled to his side, half rising and reaching for a weapon that was no longer there.  The last he’d seen of Dean, his brother had been sinking down into the shallow water at the edge of the river.  More than enough to drown in, if he were allowed to stay there.  The rest was a bit hazy.  He remembered the lion, though it seemed too large to be possible in his mind’s eye.  He remembered it crying out in pain, but he couldn’t quite piece together what had hurt it.  Not that it mattered.  All that mattered now was…

“Dean?”

His brother was sitting up not far from him, the fire between them.  He’d leaned back against the wall of what, Sam was gradually realizing, seemed to be a small cave.  It was little more than a minor depression in the wall of the mountain, really.  There was a heavy animal scent to the place, but it appeared to be clean and inhabitant free.  Except for them of course.  Sam used his good arm to push himself up into a seated position, giving Dean a confused, questioning look.

“You’re guess is as good as mine,” he said in the defeated tone Sam had come to associate with Dean’s most frustrated moments.  Not having answers didn’t just annoy him, it made him angry and, when anger ran out, depressed.  It was like watching the stages of grief every time they were on a hunt that went sideways, and it happened so often these days that Sam no longer worried about it as much as he had when they were younger.  

Sam had just opened his mouth to question when he heard a sound at the entrance to the cave.  He jerked his head around, feeling the muscles in his shoulder protest.  A woman stood in the mouth of the cave, small in stature and dressed in soft leather.  The firelight flickered on her face, but Sam could not see it.  Her features were covered with those of the bobcat mask he’d seen in the clearing.  It looked almost alive in the firelight and, when she looked at him, he felt the urge to draw back.  To cower away from her as though she were a wild beast.

“Running Deer?” he asked, certain now.

The woman’s head tilted to the side as if she wasn’t sure what to make of his question.  She stood stock still in the entrance to the cave, looking at him.  Sam wanted to glance at Dean, to defer to his brother, but he couldn’t break eye contact with the woman.  He had the feeling she was sizing him up, weighing him by some internal measure to which he was not privy, and so he held her gaze.

The moment stretched in silence.  Sam realized he was holding his breath and released it slowly.  The woman blinked at him.  Whatever she had been looking for in him, he hoped she’d found it.  With reverent slowness, she brought both hands to the sides of her face...no her mask, Sam told himself.  She was a woman, after all, and not a cat.  He could hear the slip of leather thongs being untied and, carefully, she lowered the mask away from her face.

“I do not know that name,” she said in a low, accented voice.  Her voice sounded older than her face lead him to believe she was, even knowing  _ who  _ she was.  But it didn’t sound tired, the way he and his brother so often did.  Ancient and forever, that was what he heard in her.  What he saw in her face.  “My name is Ayita.”

Sam pushed himself up to a fully sitting position, his brow furrowed, prepared to question, but the woman was moving towards him.  He saw his brother stiffen out of the corner of his eye, preparing to spring should he need to, but Sam felt no fear of this woman.  She knelt beside him and inspected his shoulder and a portion of his back, placing a firm, dry hand on his skin to turn him more towards the firelight.  Looking over his shoulder, he could see what she had done for him.  Four long, angry scratches ran across his shoulder and upper back.  They had been covered with a thick coating of some kind of mud, and laid over with leaves.  The edges had dried and were itchy, but he had enough willpower to resist that.  At least for now.

“These will heal,” she said simply, peeling back one leaf to look and then patting it back down.  “You were very lucky.”

“Thank you.”  His gratitude was sincere, but his job came before his own comfort and always would.  “But who are you?  If you’re not Running Deer…?”

“I am the being that hunts the creature, that protects the people, that waits through time until the end.”  It had a rehearsed quality to it and, for a moment, her heavy accent almost dropped away.  She’d said this often.  She’d been asked that question often.  Sam wondered if it was the first English phrase she’d ever taught herself to say.

“But...you’re the woman from the story,” Sam pressed, turning to look more fully at her.  She had the broad features of a Native American Woman and her hair, a deep, jet black, was coiled in a thick braid down her back.  She could have been a modern woman.  Or she could have been hundreds of years old.  He couldn’t tell.  “You hunt the Ew’ah to avenge your husband.”  It was no longer a question.  She had to be the woman, didn’t she?  She had to have saved them from it at the river side.

The thought of the riverside derailed Sam completely and he reached for her arm, gripping her lightly as though to stop her from avoiding him or his question, though she had yet to do either.

“The family…” he asked, suddenly in a rush for information.  “Are they…?”

“They will live,” she said, with a touch of sadness in her voice.  “The creature ran but not before she had done her foul work.  The man will never be a man again.”

Sam’s brow furrowed in confusion.  “She killed him?”

“She killed his mind.”  Ayita turned away, moving to prod the fire and positioning herself between them and the exit to the cave.  Sam wondered if she did so intentionally.  “You are clever men,” she said, almost as though the idea shocked her.  “Your tools saved not only your lives but your sanity.  How did you know to protect yourselves?”  She fixed Sam with a piercing look and, that look, above anything else, told him why she had protected them.  Why she had brought them here and tended his wounds.  She wanted information from them as much as they wanted it from her.  Sam glanced at Dean.

“We were hunting it, same as you,” Dean said gruffly.  He had the heel of his hand pressed to one temple as though fighting off a headache.  “Would’ve liked the help about ten minutes sooner.  Might have saved a man’s brain.”  The anger was coming back into Dean’s voice.  They’d failed another person, and he never took that well.

“The creature cannot be deterred.”  Ayita shook her head.  “My mission is not to protect your people.  But I could not let her take the children.  I’ve failed too many times.  I’ve gotten so tired.”  She breathed out a low sight and turned her head towards the mouth of the cave.  “It is night.  I should hunt her still, but I’m here.  Resting and tending to white men.  I’ve grown soft.”

Dean was bristling.  Sam leaned forward, taking over the conversation.

“If your mission isn’t to protect us, what is it?  In the stories you were supposed to kill the E’wah.”  Stories had a tendency to change over time, of course.  Myths grew in size and scope, characters changed.  They changed names, apparently.  Perhaps the storytellers had decided somewhere along the way that “Running Deer” sounded more Native American to non natives.  He wasn’t sure if that was racist or simple ignorance.  

“My mission was never to kill,” Ayita shook her head again.  “My mission was to protect the people.  Nothing can kill the creature.”

“Got yourselves a real Mummy situation,” Dean broke in, annoyed.  “Why in the hell did the thing get made if it was gonna be this much of a bitch?”

Ayita turned her slow gaze on Dean and watched him for a long moment.  Dean, for his part, did not turn away, but met her stare measure for measure.

“We did not make her,” she said at last.  “The creature was already hundreds of years old at the time of my birth but our ancestors did not make her the monster she became.  She did that to herself.”  Ayita turned her gaze back to the fire.  “Tell me,” she said flatly.  “Tell me why you hunted the Ew’ah. You ask for stories from my tribe, but you’ve given nothing in return.  Tell me.  Why should you be trusted?”

Sam looked at her, and, for a moment, thought he might just understand her.  He turned a look at Dean, brows drawn together, and saw his brother shrug.

“We protect people, too,” Sam said, turning his look back on her.  It wasn’t enough of an answer.  She watched him, waiting for more, and he sighed, wondering where to start.  Wondering what information would convey to her what it was they did and why they should be trusted.  “Our dad was a hunter.  He trained us to save people.  To kill monsters.”  He lowered his chin, looking up at her in a well practiced bid for sympathy and understanding.  “It’s been my whole life, since the day I was born.  I never had a choice, not really.  Even when I quit, this life was always going to be mine, and it was always waiting for me.  I think you can understand that.”

It was a gamble.  He had no way to know what motivated her after so long.  But he had to think...if 18 years of this life had been enough to make him run...then hundreds of years had to have taken their toll on her once, if not twice...if not a dozen times.  He saw his volley hit home.  Her face drew together, a look of guilt and acknowledgment on her features.

“You tracked the creature?” she asked, a note of despair in her voice.  Sam nodded.

“We saw the pattern.  The disappearing children.  The deaths.  The insanity.  We tracked it here.”

Ayita looked away from him, lowering her gaze, conceding ground for the first time.  Sam shot a hopeful glance at Dean, then back to her.

“It is my fault,” she said quietly.  “I was so tired.  A century now, it’s been, since her last kill.  And always, I watched.  I waited.  I hunted her.  But for months, there was nothing.  I thought she might be resting.  I thought perhaps she’d finally given up, or her madness had finally eaten her completely.  I left the hunt.  And she was waiting for me to do it.  Watching me as I’d watched her.  I had forgotten, somehow, how clever she has always been.”

“So this thing’s killing again because you shirked your duty?” Sam shot Dean a warning glance but his brother shrugged it off.  “Those deaths are on your hands.  Now you’re gonna tell us how to make it stop once and for all, cause it’s  _ not  _ happening again.  This ends here.”

“It never ends,” Ayita said, turning her gaze on Dean.  There was no sadness in her voice.  It was stated so flatly, Sam wondered how long ago she had come to grips with that fact.    “She cannot be killed.  Her suffering was meant to be eternal.”

“So your ancestors or whatever...they just turned a monster loose on the world and made it someone else’s problem, am I getting that about right?”

“No.”  Her voice had grown sharper, and she glared at Dean.  “She was meant to be punished.  She was meant to watch and never interact.  But she went mad.  And her madness fed on the magic.  It turned the curse.  Perverted it.  She spread her insanity to others, turned her punishment on those who had punished her.  The men of our tribe were no longer safe.  She could not be reasoned with, could not be stopped.”

“And the children?” Sam asked, breaking in quietly.  Ayita’s expression fell.  He remembered the few versions of the story...the ones that had said she was pregnant when her husband left for the hunt.  He wondered how difficult this might be for her, even after so much time.  For a long moment she was silent.

“I was not alive when the creature was made, but I know the stories.  It is said she had children.  A boy and two girls.  The boy was going to be a fierce warrior when he grew up, the entire tribe believed so.  But, with their mother taken from them, they had no one to care for them. It is not known what became of their father.  Many assumed he had died.  It is said the children were shunned, feared for their connection with their mother.  They died pitiful deaths.  So now she takes our children, because we did not care for hers.”

“Sounds to me like your people deserved a little punishing,” Dean said gruffly, looking uncomfortable.  Sam could understand his sentiment.  It was a terrible thing to do to a child.  But that burden didn’t belong on other children, it belonged on their parents.  “How do we kill it?  Everything dies, you just gotta find the right away.  What’s that...mask thing...do anyway?”

“Yeah,” Sam jumped in, his own curiosity making him more eager for the answer.  “The stories all say that the mask turned the creature’s powers on itself.  Some say it killed it, others that it ran away and was never seen again.”

“The spirit of the great cat protects me from her power, and keeps me alive so I may continue my hunt,” she said simply, adding no more.  Sam’s brow furrowed.

“But you’re a woman.  Aren’t you already safe?”  Ayita shook her head.

“The creature cannot take my mind, but she is stronger, faster, and deadlier than I could ever hope to be.  The spirit of the cat makes me fast enough to chase her, and to outrun her.  It gives me the strength to fight her.  It makes my skin thick, to take her slashes in stride.  It makes my teeth strong, to bite her with.  When the cat and I are one is the only time I am able to battle her.  She would kill me in an instant without the spirit’s protection.”

“So what you’re saying is there isn’t a damn thing we can do about this thing.  Awesome.”  Dean didn’t so much roll his eyes as roll his entire head.  He looked over at Sam with an expression that said he was done with this place, and this woman.  They’d do this themselves.  Sam gave his head the tiniest of shakes.  He wasn’t so sure they could.

“Ayita…” he said, saying the name slowly and doing his best to pronounce it as she had, “Why doesn’t she come here?  You can’t wear the mask  _ all  _ the time.  What’s keeping her from attacking right now?”

“This mountain is sacred,” Ayita said.  “She has no power here.”

Dean was looking at him.  Sam didn’t need to ask what he thought, he already knew.  His eyes had gone wide as he looked at Ayita, the same thought flickering between the two brothers.  If the creature had no power here, then surely they could kill it here.  In his excitement, Sam half rose to his knees, moving closer to Ayita.

“Let us help you,” he said, conviction dripping from every word.  “We can help you kill her once and for all.  If she’s powerless here, we can set a trap.  You’re not alone in this now, we can help you do this.”

Ayita did not respond.  Her look was pitying.  Even sad.  After a long moment, she shook her head.

“This mountain is sacred.  I cannot allow the creature to set foot here.”

“Well that’s just great!” Dean’s annoyance had finally gotten the better of him.  “Look, I realize we’re not “you’re people” or whatever but people are dying out there and I’m not gonna let that keep happening just because a hunk of rock used to be considered magic.”

“Dean…”

“No, she doesn’t want to help, then fine, we don’t need help.  Never do.”  He pointed a finger at Ayita.  “What makes you any better than that thing, if you’re just gonna let people die when you could do something about it?”

“My mission…”   


“I don’t give a crap about your mission.  You think the world ever gave a crap about you?  Or us?  We do the job and we protect  _ people. _ Not mountains.  Not beliefs.  Not rules made by people that died before we were even born.  Because  _ people  _ are worth protecting.  And you can keep your magic mountain if that’s what you wanna do, but if you’re gonna try and stop us from taking this thing down, then you need to realize which side of the line you’re actually on.”

Sam was completely unprepared for the anger that poured out of the woman.  She’d seemed so serene and even from the moment she’d arrived.  But now, she boiled over.  She stood, her small frame somehow seeming to take up at least three times the space it occupied, and her eyes flashed.

“That is the trouble with you people,” she spat at them, her accent becoming more pronounced in her anger.  “You have no history.  You have no honor.  You are unbound from the world and all that comes before.  You are selfish.  You do not have a place in the world.  My people were destroyed by yours and I watched as it happened.  I could not protect them.  They were driven from their homes and I could not go with them.  I stayed to hunt the creature as I had been tasked to do.  Because it was my duty.  Because I protect the people and our ways.  I guard our sacred places.  Now I am the only one left who truly knows them, and you would have me spit on the graves of my fathers and mothers, of my husband, and all the lives that came before and after me.  I will not do it.”

Sam stood, holding up his hands in a pacifying way between the two of them.

“Maybe there’s another way.  You said the cat spirit keeps you alive, right?  Is that what keeps her alive too?”

Ayita, derailed by his sudden question, blinked at him for a moment.

“I suppose so,” she said at last, anger still clinging to her words, making her sound almost petulant.  “She was a mortal woman before she was cursed.”

“So maybe,” Sam said, “If we remove the skin...she’ll be mortal.  And we can kill her.”

Sam caught Dean’s sneer out of the corner of his eye.  He wasn’t relishing the idea of skinning a creature that big either, particularly not if she was going to turn back into a woman as he did so.  It made his stomach turn.  But if it it worked…

“No,” Ayita said, almost instantly.  “Whatever she has done she did not ask for this curse.  She did not ask for the madness that was given to her.  She deserves punishment for her deeds but she also deserves our pity.  I would not see her defiled so.”

Sam could see Dean’s chest swell as he prepared for another tirade, but he kept his hand up, silencing his brother, and turned his full attention on Ayita, his expression soft.

“Then what other choice is there?” he asked softly.  “You said yourself she deserves our pity.  She also deserves our mercy.  She deserves to have her curse ended, and if the only way to do that is to bring her here, then isn’t it the merciful thing to do?  Which would your ancestors ask you to be, vengeful or compassionate?  The two of you are the last untouched remnants of your tribe, and that makes her part of what you’re trying so hard to protect.  If we could end the curse, shouldn’t we?  For her sake and for yours?”

Ayita’s eyes softened.  There was a yearning in them as she looked up at him, and, looking down at her, he could sympathize.  He liked his life.  He liked what he did.  He saved people’s lives and he protected the world.  But...if the day came when he could walk away, he knew that he would.  If the world no longer needed him, he would be relieved.  

“She’s suffered for so long…” she said quietly.

“And so have you.  Let us help you…”

Sam held his breath, watching her.  Her eyes traveled over his face, seeming to search for something.  He hoped she’d find it.

“Ancestors forgive me…” she breathed quietly, and Sam exhaled in relief.


	13. Chapter 13

Morning dawned sticky and grey.  That oppressive thunder was back, so much louder, it seemed, from the small cave Sam and Dean inhabited.  The rumblings had been what awakened them.  Sam felt surprisingly rested for having spent the night on a cave floor, with nothing between him and stone but a small pile of furs, mostly doeskin and not exactly the most cushioning.  Maybe he was getting old.  Maybe his back just appreciated the firmness for once.  No crappy motel springs stabbing him in the back...waking him every time he or his brother moved.  There was something to be said for simper solutions.  Even the lacerations on his shoulder felt better this morning, though the itch had grown exponentially.

Sam glanced at his brother and then around the small space they shared, but Ayita was nowhere to be found.  She’d taken last watch.  Should have expected her to slip out before morning, though he couldn’t have said exactly why he felt that way.  Perhaps because she was a spirit.  Perhaps because she didn’t want to do this…

“Think she’ll be back?” Sam asked in lieu of morning greeting.  Dean glanced around, more reluctant to let go of sleep without any visible threat to necessitate it.  

“Hope so.  For all we know she’s the only one who can actually kill the thing.”  He groaned and stretched, getting slowly to his feet.  Sam heard his back pop.  They really were getting old.  “If what she said is true though, bullet should do it.”

Ayita may have been gone but her presence lingered.  In a large, concave rock near the cave entrance, she’d left them several strips of dried meat and five flat, dense loaves of bread, each about the size of Sam’s hand and almost perfectly round.  Curious, he picked up one of the meat strips and tore off a small piece with his teeth.  The salt was heavy and strange tasting.  Not store bought to say the least.  Only has he began chewing did the flavor of the meat actually hit him.  Deer jerky.  Made sense.  It was tough and a little gamey, without any of the flavorings he’d gotten used to from the pre-packed variety.  But it wasn’t bad.  Just...different.  His brother turned to look at him and he offered him a strip.

Dean, predictably, turned his nose up at the offering, but took it all the same.  Sam suppressed a smile.  He was perfectly capable of living rough and had, on more than one occasion, lived off of things that neither of them even wanted to think about.  That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to let the world know how dissatisfied he was with the situation through the entire ordeal.  

“We’ll have to hike down and get some water at some point,” Sam said, glancing towards the edge of the cave and wondering, again, just how they’d gotten up here.  Spirit or no, it couldn’t have been an easy task.  They weren’t small men.  “I only had about half a bottle left yesterday.”

“Be good to know the lay of the land anyway.  Pick our attack point.”

“Have you even thought about how we’re going to lure that thing in?”  They hadn’t talked about it.  Having half a plan was better than no plan at all, but it still didn’t answer the most pertinent questions.  Like how they were going to survive even getting the thing to the base of the mountain in order to kill it.

“You know what, Sammy?  Lot scarier things have tried to take us down and haven’t managed yet.  We’ll figure it out.”

“What, are we just gonna go out there and...what wave our arms and yell?  It’s not exactly your most subtle plan.”

“What else can we do?  We can’t look at the thing, we can’t hear the thing, unless you’ve got a way for us to track it through sense of taste, we’re boned.”

“Well…” Sam hesitated, thinking through his suggestion to check it for holes before voicing it completely, and, realizing the true source of the idea, he flushed.  Jess...she’d been in love with a certain trilogy of books that he would not name in her senior year of college.  The third had just come out if he remembered correctly.  He was never going to hear the end of this one if Dean realized.  “What if we leave a blood trail?  We could go back to where that family was camping…”   
“Assuming we can even find it from here,” Dean interrupted, giving a grumpy roll of his eyes.

“Yeah, but if we did, we could do some shallow cuts, leave a clear path all the way here.  We do it close enough to dusk, it should be fresh enough that it would draw it right to us.”

“There’s a lot of if’s in that plan, Sammy.   _ IF  _ the thing goes back to that spot and  _ IF  _ the path is fresh enough and  _ IF  _ we can find it in the first place.”

“You’ve got a better idea I’m all ears.”

Dean considered for a moment, looking out of the mouth of the cave at the valley below them.  Thunder rumbled in the distance, but Sam could see no lightning.  Not yet anyway.  His brother chewed, meditatively, on a piece of salty meat.  Finally, he sighed.

“It’s worth a shot,” he conceded, and Sam supposed it was the best response he could hope for under the circumstances.

“What about the woman?” Sam asked, his brow drawing down in worry.  “Do we trust her to help?”

“No.”  There was no hesitation in Dean’s voice.  “If she wants to help, great, but I’m not gonna count it as an asset till we see it.  With how hard she dug her heels in, I’ll be damn surprised if she even shows up again.”

“She’s been hunting this thing for centuries,” Sam reminded him.  “You don’t think she’d sit out what might be the final fight do you?”

“Probably thinks it won’t be the last.”  Dean shrugged, unconcerned.  “Her loss.”

Sam watched his brother quietly for a moment, and then turned his gaze out towards the valley. 

“Makes you think,” he said, vaguely.  “Couple hundred years of hunting.  Only thing she has to live for.  And she lets up for even a second and just...all of this.”

“Yeah,” Dean said, his voice dropping an octave, introspectively.  “Makes you think.”


	14. Chapter 14

The hike back to the cave was turning out to be significantly more frustrating than the hike down had been.  Not only was the going rougher, for obvious reasons, but mosquitoes were quickly becoming a problem.  The oppressive, damp air had pulled them out of the mud in swarms and the boys, now dripping from several shallow cuts along their arms as they went, seemed to be attracting them by the thousand.  Sam’s back felt as though it were on fire along the four scratches as sweat trickled into the wounds.  Two of them had reopened, oozing sluggishly and staining his shirt.  He slapped at a mosquito on the back of his neck irritably and saw his brother do the same.

“It’s getting late,” Sam said, pitching his voice to carry.  Despite their closeness, sound didn’t seem to travel very far in the woods today.  He thought it might be the heaviness of the air, muffling everything.  They hadn’t heard a single chirp of birdsong all day and, in the distance, thunder rumbled almost continuously.

“Can’t be,” Dean stopped ahead of him and turned to look up at the sky, eyes squinted though there was no sun.  “We’ve been out what?  Four hours?”

“Not sure it matters with this weather.”  Thunder rumbled again, as if in agreement.  “If she hunts at dusk, it’s not like she really has to wait for the sun to go down right now.”   


“She might not hunt at all in this weather.”  Dean rubbed the back of his neck, his brow furrowed.

“Whether she does or doesn’t, we don’t wanna get caught again.  Earplugs.”  Sam dug into his pocket where he’d stashed the squashy, yellow plugs and handed a pair across to Dean.  

“Great,” Dean said, sarcasm elongating the word even as he took them from him.  “We won’t hear it coming to kill us but at least we won’t be crazy when we go.  Have I mentioned I hate this bitch?”

“You have.”  The corner of Sam’s mouth twitched in amusement and he started to put the plugs carefully into his ears.  

“You are fools, the pair of you.”

With only one ear free, he almost didn’t hear her.  Sam turned sharply to the right and looked up.  Ayita was perched on a small shelf of rock a few feet above them.  She’d moved so silently he doubted she’d disturbed a single rock as she came.  Surely they would have heard her if she had.  Her face was once more covered by the furry visage of the bobcat and he wondered if that was part of the cat spirit’s blessing.  

“We didn’t know if you’d be back,” he said simply.

“Does not make you any less of a fool,” she snapped.  “The creature hunted you and you escaped, and now you wander unprotected through her woods dripping blood and sweat.  Fools.”

“How else do you expect us to lure her in?” Dean spoke up from Sam’s left.  He turned to look at his brother and saw that neither of his earplugs here in.  He gave a little jerk of his head to indicate them and Dean rolled his eyes.  But, at the very least, he reached to put one into his left ear.  “You got a better plan I’m all ears.”

“A better plan would have been for you to wait for me.  Were you so impatient for death you could not wait while I tracked her?”

“You didn’t tell us anything,” Dean snapped, pointing at her accusingly.  “For all we knew, you bailed.”

“This has always been my hunt.  You have wandered into it without knowledge or understanding.  You should have waited for me.”  Suddenly, her head turned to the side, a movement so sharp, Sam turned as well, nearly expecting to see the creature bearing down on him.  “She comes.  You must run, or you will die.  Stop your ears and do not look her in the face.”

Ayita was moving.  She flowed off the rock ledge with a silent grace born of the feline spirit that protected her.  Sam jammed the second earplug in, nearly too late.  The creature, moving with such suddenness Sam had to wonder how long she’d been tracking them in silence, crashed into the path behind them.  He shut his eyes, fumbling in his pants pocket for the smeared sunglasses.  He’d gone an extra step, adding ash from their fire to further obscure the lenses.  They reduced the world to shadowy figures and darkness.  With them on, he could barely see to walk, but he hoped it would be enough to keep him on the path.  And he sincerely hoped Dean was already wearing his.  The creature cried out, sending a wave of dizziness through his head, despite the muffling effect of the ear plugs.  He risked a look through the darkened glasses at the path behind them.

The creature was every bit as large as he remembered it, and it towered over Ayita.  She had seemed small to him before.  So many people did because of his height, but she, in particular, had seemed dainty.  Solid and strong, but no match for this thing.  Seeing her standing in front of it now, instinct overrode sense.  Sam stood his ground, drawing his gun, but he didn’t trust himself to fire it with his vision so impaired.  He might hit her.  Dean’s hand closed firm on his shoulder, tugging him, urging him to move and move now, but Sam balked for a moment longer, watching them.  The girl and her monster.

She had no weapons.  Ayita stood before the creature, almost indiscernible from the monster’s shadow in Sam’s impaired vision, with nothing to protect herself.  It rose, more like a bear than a cat, and as the creature fell on her, Sam very nearly ran towards her.  

The two closed.  For a moment, in Sam’s vision, they were nothing but a writhing blob of darkness.  And then, defying all reason, Ayita stood alone.  The creature yowled as it landed, several feet further down the path.  She must have thrown it.  It lost no time, spring back towards her, lower now, running on four legs.  Dean’s voice was in his ear, shouting to be heard, telling him to come on, and finally Sam turned...but not before he’d seen the creature raise one massive paw to swipe at Ayita’s unprotected skin.  The scratches on his back seemed to burn in sympathy, and he ran.

The path back to the cave had been difficult before.  It was nearly impossible now.  As they ran from the creature, it’s cries became more distant, but still they were plagued by them. Each one brought a wave of dizziness that let Sam’s head aching, and he was more than grateful, each time, for the earplugs.  Another of his scratches opened painfully as he dragged himself up a rocky stretch of the path, but he kept moving, following the blurred outline of his brother ahead of him.  They were moving more upwards now...they had to be officially on the mountain didn’t they?

Seemingly having the same thought, Dean stopped ahead of him to catch his breath and Sam followed suit.  His back felt wet with sweat and blood.  He could practically smell it.  He had to be a beacon to any predator in the area right now.  Maybe that would be enough to continue to draw the creature to them.  He risked pulling off the sunglasses and looking at Dean with a hopeful, questioning expression.

“Do you think…?” but the question went unfinished.  Thunder cracked so loud overhead that Sam ducked, reacting on the instinct of a species that once cowered in caves hiding from the thunder.  It was loud almost solid a sound, seeming to shake the very ground under their feet.  Somewhere behind them, the creature screamed.  Sam sank to his knees, dizziness finally proving too much for him, and he felt what little they’d had to eat rising up at the back of his throat.  Dean’s hands were on his shoulders and he looked up at him, but his brother wasn’t looking back.  His attention was fixed on something behind him, though how much he could see Sam couldn’t know.  The light seemed to be fading so fast it was like someone had flipped a switch.  Overhead, massive thunderheads were rolling in from behind the mountains.  Any minute now, they were going to open up and drown them.

“It’s working…”

Sam looked back, sunglasses forgotten, and very nearly did himself in.  The massive lion was approaching, seeming to struggle against an unseen barrier.  Its head was down and its eyes were closed.  It bore massive scratches across nose and shoulder.  Perhaps Ayita hadn’t been as unarmed as Sam had thought.  The creature pushed one massive paw forward, and then another, struggling up the mountain towards them.  Only it wasn’t a paw she placed down now...it was a hand…

“Dean…”

His brother snatched off his sunglasses the better to watch the thing approach.  She pushed towards them, a heat shimmer seeming to block her path.  As she pushed through it, one hand became two, dirty nails scrabbling in the dirt.  Still, she pressed forward.  Her head seemed to shrink in front of his eyes, not so much disappearing as drawing into itself.  The eyes opened and he cried out, jumping back, but he needn't have bothered.  The eyes were dead, empty sockets.  He was no longer looking at a massive lion, but the dried shell of one.  It fell forward and he could see now, what he hadn’t before.  It was merely the skin, draped over a woman.

“Dean she’s…”

“The woman from the road, I know.”  She looked so much worse than she had the first time they had seen her.  Whatever illusion had shown her to them before was gone now, and they saw her as she was.  Her hair was black and wild, tangled beyond hope of salvation.  Her body was covered in the lion skin but, beneath it, she wore soft leather, similar to what Ayita had worn.  The scratches on her face and shoulder seemed so much more violent now.  Four red lines stretched across her entire face, ripping it open, dripping blood down her nose and cheeks.  She looked up at Sam and Dean with pain filled eyes.

“A..da..hisdee...aya…”

Her voice was softer, more musical than Sam had expected it to be.  He blinked at her, feeling his head shake though he hadn’t registered yet that had meant to do so.

“We don’t…”

“She asks you to kill her.”  Sam jumped and turned.  Ayita stood behind his brother, looking down at the creature....no, the woman...with sadness in her eyes.  She looked surprisingly unharmed for having faced off against her so recently.  There were scratches to her arms and her clothing was ripped, but she seemed otherwise unharmed.  Slowly, she pushed the bobcat mask up off her face, pulling it free.  It dangled from the tips of her fingers for a moment, and then she let it fall to the ground.  With slow, measured steps, she moved past them, towards the prone woman on the ground.  She knelt beside her, reaching out to cup her bloodied cheek.

“Aya u-ha as-da-wadeyuda nas gi na-i gana-vi-da, u-la.”

The woman reached up a hand and placed it on Ayita’s arm.  She looked up at her and the lion skin slipped, falling back off her head.  Her eyes closed, as though a great weight had suddenly fallen away from her, and she breathed deep. When she opened her eyes again, they were clear.

“Ho wa tsu.”  Her voice was stronger.  It held a certainty Sam hadn’t heard it in before.  He wished he knew what she said.  Whatever it might have been, Ayita nodded, smoothing the woman’s hair.  She looked back up at the boys.

“I carry no weapon,” she said simply, and held out her hand.  Dean, moving readily, began to hold out his gun, but Sam stopped him.  Reaching for his belt, he pulled out their knife.  Cruder, but he thought she would find it more appropriate.  She gave him a small nod of approval and he walked towards her, holding the weapon out handle first.  She took it from his hand.  “Thank you.”

Sam stepped back a respectful distance as Ayita turned back towards the woman.  Carefully, almost lovingly, she drew the woman half onto her lap, cradling her as she might have a child.  She rocked her, and began to sing.  It was a low, pained sounding song, in a language Sam could not understand.  It seemed broken, despairing, like weeping turned into words.  She placed the tip of the knife against the woman’s chest and then, in a single push, buried it to the hilt.  The woman tensed, making a sharp cry that quickly cut off.  Sam could see her lips moving but he could no longer hear what she said.  There was a sense of urgency in her expression as she spoke.

“Aya oonay-lagi adadeli-sedi, u-la.”  Ayita smoothed her hair again.  “A-nagaysdi tegay-usah.”

The woman’s eyes drifted closed, a shudder going through her.  So fast.  The knife must have hit her heart.  Ayita held her still, rocking her gently, and crooning her sorrowful song.  The boys watched in silence as thunder rumbled overhead, and the first few drops of rain began to fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All Cherokee phrases were presented phonetically as the boys would hear them rather than written out properly. They were taken from the Dikaneisdi dialect. Below, I have translated the phrases used in this chapter:
> 
> A da hisdee aya - Kill me.  
> Aya u-ha as-da-wadeyuda nas gi na-i gana-vi-da. - I have followed you for so long, my sister.  
> Ho wa tsu - Please.  
> Aya oonay-lagi adadeli-sedi, u-la - I forgive you, my sister.  
> A-nagaysdi tegay-usah - Go with love


	15. Chapter 15

The rain fell heavily in the mountains, bringing with it a cool breeze that eased the heat in the valley.  Sam and Dean sat in the small cave they’d slept in, prodding the fire between them, and casting furtive glances at each other and at the woman who shared their space.  Ayita sat with her back to them at the mouth of the cave, looking out at the rain as it fell over the valley.  She had not spoken more than a word as she’d led them up to the cave, only to disappear on them again.  When she’d returned, she’d been muddy and exhausted.  They’d dug enough graves in their time to know better than to ask.

As the day wore on and the rain continued to fall, Sam found himself at the mouth of the cave beside her, watching as the sky darkened towards night above the clouds.

“What will you do now?” he asked her.

“I will go home,” she said simply, without looking at him.  “My great task is complete.  My husband waits for me beyond.  It is past time I went to him.”

“So...you’re going to die?”  Sam felt a pang at the idea.  He didn’t know this woman, but that didn’t mean he didn’t care if she lived or died.  

“No, not die,” she corrected him.  “White men have such strange concepts.  I will not die.  I will depart.”

Sam watched her for a moment, thinking about what she’d said.  It made sense, in its own way.  She’d lived so long, and fought so hard, and now she could go to her rest with a clear heart and mind.  He envied her, in that moment.  Envied her for the rest he knew in his heart he and Dean would never have.  They would never be done.  Neither Heaven or Hell was ever going to let them rest.  He looked at her from the corner of his eye.  She seemed at peace.  How nice that must have felt.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Sam and Dean awoke alone, only this time neither of them were surprised.  Gathering their packs, they left the cave in silence, without looking back.  The trail was easier to follow now, having already traveled it once, and they made good time.  Some of the heat had gone out of the scratches on Sam’s back, for which he was grateful.  The pack rubbed at them, a constant irritant, but a bearable one.  He wondered how badly they would scar.

Once they found the river, going went easier.  They followed it downstream until they came upon the place they’d first seen the creature, and from there they were able to backtrack to the road.  Baby was still parked where they’d left her, with a little green sticker on her windshield from the State Troopers that had clearly been by.  Dean ripped it off wordlessly and tossed it on the road before popping the trunk.  Only here, on more familiar territory, did either of them speak more than a few words.

“Where to next?” Dean asked, an almost lightness in his tone.

“You don’t want to, I dunno, take a breather for like a day?” Sam asked, a quirk to his lips.  “I haven’t exactly had wifi to check the hot sheets the past couple days.”

“I feel like I didn’t get to do anything on this one.  Just stand around with my thumb up my ass.  I wanna hunt something, damn it.”  

Sam smiled and shook his head.  Dean would always want another hunt, no matter what the outcome of the previous one was.  “We’ll see,” he said noncommittally, sliding into the hot car.  He winced as his back made contact with the seat.  “Maybe give me a couple days to recover for once, and we’ll see.”

“Pansy,” Dean said, sliding into the driver’s seat, but he gave his brother a smile.  These were the good times, Sam thought.  The best times.  After a successful hunt, knowing they’d done a good job, even if they hadn’t struck the killing blow, it always made them both feel better.  Lighter.  

“Yeah, whatever,” Sam said with a chuckle.  “Let’s get out of here before your car melts.”  Already the heat was rising, steaming the rain puddles out of existence.  Dean reached out and turned on the AC, setting the legos inside to rattling as the fans kicked on.  Sam gave him a smile.  He reached out and flipped on the radio, the first few strains of an old Johnny Cash song filling the car, and the impala pulled onto the road, and headed off, out of town.


End file.
